


heart is singing low

by the hyacinth girl (arguendo)



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Canon, M/M, Sheith Big Bang, Suit Porn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-16
Updated: 2017-08-16
Packaged: 2018-12-16 02:07:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 28,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11818974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arguendo/pseuds/the%20hyacinth%20girl
Summary: "Is this a matter of modesty?" the alien says. "I must confess that I see no great difference between the impression given by your current garments and the one that you would present if you chose to wear—""That's aminiskirt," Keith says, outraged.A year after the fall of the Galra Empire, Keith's a little damaged, Shiro's on the run, and the universe hasn't stopped needing heroes.





	heart is singing low

**Author's Note:**

> my first submission for the sheith bigbang 2k17! heaps of thanks to [the world's best eventmod](https://twitter.com/caustically), who stayed on top of every loop thrown his way, and definitely to [ros](http://kingkoganes.tumblr.com), who graciously agreed to work around my schedule. but let's be real, you don't care about all this textual nonsense. just look! at this art!!
> 
> and now, for the low, low price of nothing at all, you too can immortalise this gorgeousness on your blog [here](http://artbyros.tumblr.com/post/164252808310/here-is-my-illustration-for-the-sheithbigbang-i)!

# *

Overhead, a lion scorches through the clouds like a comet.

Up Shiro looks from the lagoon—rumples his hair as a shadow skims the silver-stitched waters. He'd shucked his helmet an hour ago, waded the shallows while the drone—a gift from his last mission on dry golden Sjoumer—spun through the terrain. A breach in protocol, but he'll give himself some leeway: twenty hours burned in orbit around this new planet, just one more drifting wire-and-metal body built to circulate the cockpit's reused oxygen, waiting for the first breach in defenses to filter through his screen.

Now: _red, red_ , the lion comes plummeting headlong—twists and strikes the sand in a pulse of thunder, goes loping with its tail awave and dust billowing from its flashing heels. It lashes to an end where beach gives way to pearly shoal. Pebbles scatter, shrapnel everywhere. The lion coils in the grit, sleek and fearless, before its simmering eyes go dark.

Shiro rises from the water to meet it.

Metal clanks and settles; the pilot's hatch murmurs, singing out. The Red Lion bends as her rider tugs himself into a new planet's gravity. _Beat, beat, beat_ , steps go thudding across the lion's head. A silhouette surges up, black against the iron-flushed horizon, solid and helmeted and inhuman—before it braids its fingers together, stretches with the raggedy disgruntlement of a thirty-hour ride. 

"Looks like you got taller after all," Shiro calls.

The shadow stiffens. One heartbeat and it's unraveled: fists electric, visor sinking, spine bolting beneath its paladin's armor. Staring. In the next, it's kicked off its perch, sailed into the gaping air.

Shiro jolts back—but Keith plunges into his landing with the same gutting certainty of his lion. A red glove flares up, snatching at his helmet, which goes tumbling—and then Keith's crossing the sand, kicking up steam-pale puffs until he's a short reach away, stranded by inches, centimeters, seizing Shiro's shoulders until bone grinds bone. " _Shiro_."

He's living tattered-worn disbelief, drawn sharp from brows to teeth, breathing harsh as any new cadet clawing out of a nightmare. His hair's knotted hazily at his nape, his face's half-shadowed, a lodestar gaze and a blackening frown—Shiro's staring. He can't stop. One hand smoothes over Keith's knuckles, chafing warm sparks into the trembling. "Keith," he says, steadying. The fist jerks, scalded. "It's me. It's all right."

Keith's eyes snap up. His grip bristles before it splinters away. Back across the sand he stumbles, paces away before he hauls upright.

Dusk pours between them, wave by wave. 

His wrist drops—flexes as if to flake the rust from its hinges. Shiro says, "I guess the princess didn't tell you."

Time and distance, but all the old signs hold true. Keith hunches; his throat ticks like a cooling engine. "Didn't ask her," he says, low. "The mission brief was pretty old."

It makes sense. When Galra battalions had flooded the system in millennia past, Rhoen sold its place in the universe for freedom. It shed all its old alliances in the space of a year, folded itself into the gaping black between stars, and evaporated. Over the centuries, only local traders reported any glimpses of it on their routes, key-glinting flashes out of a space-pocket sewn shut. Even now, its defenses unraveling, Rhoen's still no war-prize: long stripped of any manufacturing ambitions, the old fervent population dwindled off its soil. Just a gaudy marble spinning adrift, its central continent run to white mountains and black jungles and slate-walled cities. No one'd thought it worthwhile to track for eight thousand years. He'd almost skipped the flight himself—but rumors had tugged him from the neighboring system in the end. He'd passed the latest of the collected briefings to the castle, his own transmission tacked on almost as an afterthought: _heading to these coordinates. Not urgent, but backup might help._

"Well," Shiro says, "you're actually just in time. I was beginning to think that we wouldn't get in. The report claims that Rhoen's been disabling its shields over the system, but from what I've seen, most of the planet's still covered. It still doesn't show up on the monopulse radar—we would've flown past it if I hadn't gotten the orbital parameters from a local. I wouldn't have blamed you if you'd missed it."

"You're hard to miss," Keith says.

Thunder rattles the dunes; the Black Lion's still looming behind him, jaws agape. Shiro bows first to the silence's pull; he looks over the tide, the horizon's slender blaze. "I thought Lance was handling the distress calls these days," he says. "Is he coming along?"

"He had an assignment at the Garrison."

"The _Garrison?_ I'd hope that even Iverson would know he's a little beyond cargo pilot material at this point."

Keith's still staring, a frenzy caged under his brittle quiet; but the question seems to shake off some heavy chain. He straightens; his shoulders square to match his armor. "He's their interplanetary advisor. He wants to get Earth up to speed on what's out here—and he figured the Garrison was a good place to start. He keeps calling himself _Earth's mightiest hero._ " It's a litany, a droning recital with his arms still corded tight to either side—the physical thought of a man disarmed and suspended, twitching for a sword. "Pidge's traveling with the Olkari to break down Galra technology, get the stuff that's usable out to the rest of the universe as soon as possible. She's been with them for months. Hunk's—sort of an intergalactic diplomat now, I guess."

"Diplomacy, huh." Shiro weighs it on teeth and tongue—feels the click like an old lock's surrender. Behind the grey door of memory, nostalgia's stitching old snapshots together: Hunk's square knuckles and fingertips, the hairs fine as coaldust over his ropy veins; the way he'd tilt his head and roll his jaw, snip and hum every syllable of an alien word to get it right; his shoulders bouncing as he chased sloe-eyed, coltish children sniffing and snouting into the kitchens two varga before meals. The quake of the old winterlit halls, towards the war's end: pidgin and branched dialects winding together under every vaulted arch, hundreds on hundreds of languages looping into one another and flowing ever onward. Every chamber laughing alight when he'd ghosted by, a sentinel making his steely, programmed rounds.

"Can't say it doesn't suit him," he says to the softening dusk. "Although I'm kind of surprised he didn't head back to Earth with Lance."

"It's a long story," Keith says. Shiro cocks a brow, shifts on his heels. A tic jumps in Keith's jaw with his clenching fists, then eases. He folds his arms. "You remember that flavoring one of the traders gave us before we got into position around Fuent's star? Hunk made—those weird _pies_ out of the pack. Turns out none of the castle's refugees could tell us what it was—just that it was safe for carbon-based life. Pidge broke down the chemical composition, but no one could figure out how to _make_ it. After we left, Hunk went through five systems trying to find it—and then the neighboring planet tried to pick a fight with the local regent while we were on Antara. Most of the planets that the Galra invaded passed some kind of law about intergalactic interference, so he had to think fast. We were," his wrists crook against each elbow, "sort of at war with both of them while Hunk went down to Denobula in the Yellow Lion to talk to their council."

"They let the Yellow Lion onto the planet?"

"Denobula had a law against _invaders_ coming out of nowhere. Not a lot of people say no to an alien food truck." Keith twitches another shrug. "After that, it kind of—turned into its own thing. Hunk travels the universe, bringing new food to different planets, and tries to get the locals to stop grabbing for power now that the Galra Empire's gone. He's got connections all over the place."

"A food truck."

"Turns out," Keith says, "you can cook five steaks at a time on the Yellow Lion's APUs. You just have to double-wrap them in foil and watch them when he accelerates."

"That's a lot of trouble for one year. But I guess I can't be too surprised."

A black-eyed look flashes up to meet him—but Shiro takes it with rue and a smile. Keith's desert-bred, war-forged, born for greater heights; he doesn't gossip and he doesn't keep tabs on the people who vanish on him. There's only one way that he could know what Hunk's been up to.

Keith's head jerks. "I don't have to fly out with him much," he says—and this, at least, has resisted the filmy transformation of time: his voice rings to the same low, confessional beat. "The Yellow Lion can handle itself." He turns from the shore. The long collar of his paladin's uniform's rumpled, torn; a strand of hair ribbons and sways beneath it, wind-coaxed. "Do we have to keep _talking_ about everyone else? This isn't the ten-year reunion."

Three steps. A thought, a flash, could close the gap. _Distance equals velocity in time_ , boots scraping sand—but this is a matter of applied force more than junior high physics. Classical mechanics as metaphor: _no progress comes where the force applied is perpendicular to the distance traveled._ The equations he knows; it's habit that's slower to yield. His hand flexes as memory jars memory: Keith's wing-slim wrist turning under his fingertips, the sure weight of his eyes under a blistered dusk. _This and then._ It's a dead-anchor kind of contradiction: this new, clipped desperation against the way Keith'd used to say his name, in halls that time had abandoned. How those ice-brittle shoulders had melted against him, once upon a war.

"I guess we don't," Shiro says, too soft. "How're you?"

"I should be asking _you_ that. Your grip's a lot weaker than it used to be."

At once, Shiro rolls his arm, pulling static through twinging nerves and copper tendons in self-conscious reflex; he measures the ache like a man stretching a ribbon. "Just a bad run-in on the last mission," he says. "I had a few tweaks made. I promise I'd contact the castle if I needed repairs that I couldn't handle."

"Sure," Keith says, and it's stark in his teeth. "The castle."

Shiro looks at him: the hair grown loose, the jackbooted stride, the shadow which spills over dunes and grainy heaps, longer and broader than it'd ever loomed before—but maybe that's the wrong double-image: layering this battered soldier under the sparrow-boned boy who'd once raced to the Galaxy Launch Complex for the dawn takeoff, his collar crooked and his hair an inky crop, a button swaying under his jaw like an old, familiar star. He should know better.

"I tried to call you," he says. "After the last battle in Fuent."

"Yeah. I got the messages." Something crackles under the words, sparks reeling around a radio-wave's axis—but Keith's already turning away, a stiff silhouette to the inland dusk. He bends, clasping the paladin's helmet between his palms. "Let's just get this over with."  


# *

  
An hour and the drone comes spinning back, trilling the short, silvery notes of an empty scan: _safe, safe, safe._ By then, they're halfway through the camp prep. They split the chores without a word. Shiro heads out to the lagoon's edge, settling on a strip of shore where stones glint like smoked glass. There, he puzzles over his automated fishing dome: promised to cage and keep creatures suitable for consumption, and unlace their meat from the needling skeletons, too. The drone orbits his work, drifting while he digs two metal fingers into the dome's open jaws, feeling for some switch. Its readout wheels with holograms: willowy branches flurrying in a stray breeze, tiny bones gleaming through their braiding branches, pearled black leaves lined with hungry, needle-thin stings; frilled, ice-pale birds in flight; ivy with fruit clinging intricate as chandeliers, each berry a ripe quartz marble. These last, the drone's compilation suggests, should taste not unlike the earth sustenance known as _potatoes_ after boiling.

The water sways against the shore; the cage tilts and bumps against Shiro's metal knuckles—he glances down and it clamps shut on his fingers. On land, Keith fetches, kicks twigs out of their campsite, lugs back kindling by the armful and huge pelts thick enough to cushion them from gravel. He doesn't look over, even once.

Backs turned, they stand apart under the reddening wild sky, waiting for the last battered rays of the Rhoenese sun to bleed dry. 

In the end, he bumps and taps the right sequence into the dome; malice-lit, it clambers up from his gaping fingers and leaps into the water. He heads back to shore. Keith's already sitting with his fists grinding the crooks of his elbows, staring into the yellow-blue-yellow flare like a boy sifting fortunes. He's heaped a hill's worth of logs next to their chemical heatpack. Supposedly, each pack can sustain itself for up to forty-eight hours—but there's no harm in conserving their resources. It isn't every day that they land on a planet with non-sentient forests.

Shiro opens his mouth; the silence shivers but holds. He settles in the dust opposite, elbow tilting against a knee. "The local ecosystem's consolidated into something pretty efficient," he says as the drone sails overhead with electric glee. With Keith, all of the icebreakers are practical. "As far as I can tell, there's no competition: every single organism's reproducing at exactly the rate it needs to feed and consume everything else. I'll stream some of the data for you to take back to Pidge, if you want it later—she and the Olkari may be able to do something useful with that."

A grunt plucks at Keith's throat and sticks there to rust. Not practical enough.

Shiro says, "How much do you know about the area?"

His elbows jut out with a porcupine's feral manners—but the cue lifts his head, too. "I read the brief," Keith says. "The request came from a few planets over, right? Some traders said the signal told them to pass the message on to the biggest force currently rebelling against the Galra empire. But it was signed with a weird symbol."

Shiro nods, chafing at a knee. "We can probably expect some resistance on this one. Normally planets try to stay independent for their on-world problems, no matter how advanced their civilisations get. Rhoen's had a long history of avoiding interference—that goes for both anything between neighboring planets and with the alliances outside their system. Even if someone high up the chain here asked for help, they probably don't have widespread approval from the local forces. To be honest," he adds, "I'm a little surprised anyone here even looked for Voltron."

Quiet clumps between them like lead, broken only by firefly sparks.

"I streamed some of the archives during orbit," he adds. "It looks like this part of the system's been dominated by a single religion for a few thousand years. By the time civilisations advance to the point where they can agree on what to _believe_ , they usually have their own channels for handling disputes. If anyone on Rhoen's calling off-planet..."

"Maybe you're just overthinking it."

There's no kindness to the words or the way Keith looks at him, dark and fixed. Shiro looks back: rueful, smiling, unswayed. "We haven't had a lot of reports from this area in the last few centuries, Keith," he says. With a steeled hand he reaches up, taps _unlock_ into the drone's pad as he crooks two fingers to beckon him over. "You can take a look at the data for yourself. I get the feeling there's more at stake here than rescue."

Silence. _Wrong move_ —but the thought comes too late. Already Keith's jaw is grinding, sharpening with the tick of his throat. A wave bursts over the nearby shore unseen. "If you really want to know," he says over its thunder, "there's a better way to find out. "

Two lions raise their lanterned eyes as he arrows towards their dunes. Keith jerks a glance to Black—but the Red Lion bends to her paladin first; a ramp unfurls out to his striking heels. One heartbeat, two, and she's swallowed him whole, flanks gleaming with new purpose. Three, and metal groans awake. A lightning bound sends her sailing over the thin crest of the forestline.

By the campfire, Shiro stops in place. "Actually, that could've gone a lot worse," he tells the ashes.

The Black Lion grumbles, grating and metallic; she settles again onto her paws, answerless as any sphinx pried out from its sand.  


# *

  
"So much for that," Shiro says later, in much the same tone.

Three hours from landing to capture. It's probably a record.

The binding vines chafe—but it's the ache that weighs on him, charring nerve and memory, every vein still boiling with the echo of adrenaline. Keith stirs against his back, heart pounding in a storm; he doesn't speak.

Three hours past. The Red Lion had taken the aerial view; common sense dictated that someone doublecheck a new drone's handiwork. Alone, Shiro'd trailed the lion's vast shadow on foot through the cluttered underbrush. The forest rustled around him, cool and shimmering, black-swept from leaves to roots. He'd felt the rumble through his boots before he'd seen it: the treetops storming with dust, pale coils writhing through the cloud—and by then he'd been running.

Vines had snared the Red Lion midflight—great pearled stalks which wormed and surged out of the churning earth, a nest's worth reeling and eeling and prying into its carapace, stitching wet, squirmy tendrils into the hairline gaps between the lion's plates. Alarms howled through the cockpit; in red flashes, he could see Keith snarling at every control, yanking trigger after trigger as his Lion thrashed beneath a mass writhing white-white-white. Its jaws swung open, streaming flame as its thrusters roared in bursts—but all around the clearing, tree after tree was bowing towards the fray, and new vines came swarming out of their snaking, malicious branches as the old ones charred away. Down the Red Lion's hinged-wide throat they crammed, bulbous white bodies thickening and throbbing to _choke_ —and through his gut, Shiro felt the Black Lion stirring, churning into outrage the moment that vines crammed the Red Lion full, began to split its body open from the inside.

It's easier in memory, framed by retrospect: how white had tangled in festering knots over the lion's head and windshield. The way every thought cracked, thinking ground down to a haze, every instinct and strategy rattling jumbled in his skull. Window-glass shrilled as it fissured, and Shiro was crying out after all, lungs searing, desperate: 

"Keith, _Keith_ —" 

His knees burned with his palms, scrabbling, and a vine caught him in the ribs as it looped and reared and pitched him into empty air—but his steel hand clamped into its flesh and Shiro _clung_ , dragging himself into the seething mass. Halfway up, closer, closer—just in time to glimpse a face drained pale, the scorched-bright print of Keith's fingerprints smearing through the breaking glass as the vines swarmed. Their eyes struck and caught, and he was shouting by then, just wild and empty noise as Keith slammed down the leftover controls, every measure to save a body long sunk. Faraway thunder rolled like the sea. "Keith, _please,_ you have to listen to me, _you need to eject_ —"

The vine bucked; Shiro fell.

On the broken soil, he'd rolled to his feet—but the sea-sounds were twining into shouts and pounding footsteps. A regiment had flooded the clearing: a wash of masks and bone armor, laser spears cocked in the crooks of their elbows. He'd fought—he remembers that. Slashing movement. His arm searing fit to brand. The Black Lion's force charging hot through the back of his skull. Iron reeking where it dripped through his teeth.

Elsewhere, figures leapt and clambered onto the vines; nimble troopers ran its intricate snaking like pathways. Elsewhere: metal hinges blared through the clearing, ragged and real. A hatch opened. A body thudded down with its steel.

The world shocked back into focus. 

It took five soldiers to haul Keith down: two kicked off the vines as he bristled and fought. Two to bind his wrists and chain his ankles in swollen vines while the last kept its boot nailed at his nape. Shiro'd been bound by then, numb and staring—but the Rhoenese troop hadn't wanted to drag them anywhere. They'd strung their prisoners together, four wrists bound in a single loop—punted them to the roots of a vast, clumping trunk and left them to sit.

He hadn't been thinking. He'd admired the jungle through snapshot holograms: a system caught in a single neat cycle, thousands on thousands of thriving lives that had crowded out entropy. None of the scans had pried deep enough. The Sjoumer drone swept for slavering beasts, for sentient trickster foliage, for any glimmer of new blood spilled into the jungle's weathered oxisol. It hadn't accounted for civilisation. On Rhoen, the locals trusted their shields; but they must've trusted more in war. In millennia past, Rhoenese hands had planted those sproutlings; wide, scientific smiles had schooled the leaves to bite, the icy birds to shrill alarms at alien wings, the vines to snare any shadow which strayed over them. This was a synthetic world, start to finish.

He should have seen it.

"It's all right," Shiro says out loud. Their translator splintered off somewhere in the rush; their guards' milling comes through only in an endless crow-voiced chatter. Keith's still stiff against his back; with some care, Shiro tips against him just to take the impact: the savaging point to each shoulderblade, the graceless curve of his spine. "I reviewed every report they've filed under Rhoen for the past three thousand years," he adds, quieter. "They're pretty far past their phase of eating other sentient species."

Disgruntled, dissatisfied, Keith only twists. "When's the last time you were on a planet that tried to _eat_ you?"

Years ago, they would have struck onto the soil of new planets together. Keith would have seen every piece of the Galra Empire as he had, the way it'd sprawled through systems over time, the corners of it driven to drought and desperation. The round bellies, the little red teeth. Shiro's smile quirks. "You'd be surprised," he says.

"Tell me later," Keith says, every word ground into focus. "They shouldn't have seen us _coming_."

He presses back a little more, takes the way Keith cinches at once into a statue. "Relax, Keith."

"Relaxing isn't going to get us any less _captured_. I messed up."

"No," Shiro says, too soft. "You didn't. Trust me, all right?"

It earns him tension, a prickling shiver—but Keith's wrists go slack. With careful purpose, Shiro tips his head back; his eyes lid as his fingers turn. _Your grip's a lot weaker than it used to be_ —but that was his own fault. He'd kept a shard-sharp eye on the Sjoumer mechanic as she worked, left the full check by the wayside—but a trick's a trick. His wrist bends, grinding the heel of a metal palm into a tendon; with human fingers, with jolts trickling up through exposed wiring, he fumbles to tug out the last screw left loose, to—

 _Click_.

Every nerve's humming awake; but he's easing hand from metal wrist, stretching thin enough to leave the loop gaping. Keith shifts against him once; his whole frame tenses.

"Again! _Speak_. We have hostages to host, after all."

It sings through a glinting-new translator, a clean hard note that could strike the rust off steel. The troops have massed into a semi-circle; and over it looks, a slim silvery stranger draped in clinging black; its face glows bare beneath the shadowy hood, flashing inky, short-cropped hair, and its teeth flicker, sharp and brittle beneath their hard bright eyes. The robe leaves nothing to guesswork: millennia into their isolation, the Rhoenese shape is still just short of human: bipedal, with a reptilian scuttle. Glossy obsidian wraps each wrist in snaking coils; its claws are layered with faceted black glass, pieces pierced into place.

"We're not looking for trouble," Shiro tells the stranger. Unseen, his fist seizes Keith's shirt to dock him against the soil. They hadn't torn the bayard from Keith's grip when they'd brought him down. _Eighty percent of sentient species with circulatory systems maintain a vulnerable pulse point in the throat._ The stranger's in charge, that much is clear, and not one of their sensors is chirping against any guarding radar or forcefield—but every planet needs one chance. "We were just passing through the system and stopped to refuel. We had no idea that this area had been colonised."

"You landed on a planet which has been, until recently, locked under the shields of fifteen nations. Why, it's nearly four millennia that our planetwide treaties and agreements have been in place. Colonised," the stranger says, "would be a light word for it."

"You disabled your cloaking devices right after the end of an interstellar war," Keith says. "How'd you think you _didn't_ have any neighbors who were going to check up on you? There's a whole galactic trade association that looks for planets _just_ like these."

Shiro's brows twitch—that's one cover blown; but the stranger laughs. "Are you going to name yourselves merchants? You're awfully wary for someone with wares to _sell_."

Keith's shoulders crackle electric. "Well, maybe I like customers that can pay me with _real money_. Not just leaves or something."

"You should be so lucky as to take a splinter from us. They're uncooperative," the figure tells its guards, the kind of clarity meant to be overheard. "I see the matter needs more discussion. Let's start with his keeper." 

It nods once to Shiro.

A heartbeat lashes through him. The clearing fractures.

Later he'll reconstruct the scene—an exercise of memory if not of observation. Two moons straying up through the night, clouds wispy on their battered, curving horns. The open clearing thronged in whispering, ink-veined leaves. The figure in shadow, cocked hip and a heavy hood. The sentinels fanning into the herringbone shape of a hostage-taker's formation, every uniform embroidered with silver and grey as packed ash. A hiss and hollowing air as the bindings snaked from Keith's wrists. But that's imagination: reframing kinetics too sharp for the senses to contain.

He'd seen Keith fight at sixteen, at nineteen: all fists and elbows and swift hooking ankles, tricks plucked out of schoolyards and alleyways, the kind of bruisy knockdown tumbling that counted on his slenderness and the quicksilver twist of his body. Even as the war ground them down to sawtooth-edges, Keith lay siege like a soldier, caged by the limits of bone and human sinew.

What shatters the ranks is a wildfire.

Shiro's on his knees, one wrist flayed to wire and raw fibers, as the guards surge into a calculated spin and close in. It's a bristling melee, all firebursts and steel and lasers in an arrowing hail—but Keith's gone. One kick launches him from the earth and he arcs through the moonlight in a silvering shot. His heel catches down an incoming guard's armor, driving sparks out of steel—and then he's tilting forward, staggering up, up, up. His steps clash onto one shoulder, another, racing from body to body in a scramble. A guard kicks up her gunbarrel, aiming, and in the next heartbeat Keith's hauled his bayard high. The point slams through the slivered gap between flesh and steel, wrenching deep. Noise spatters—a throat pulping black over white cartilage. The guard drops; the squadron tatters apart, tiding away in every direction, but Keith's already dragged the blade loose and gone plunging after them, livid and mindless. 

There's a shout blazing in his throat— _Keith! you have to stop, we're_ —but Shiro's still staggering to his feet, savaging off the last bindings as he works to clamp unwired hand back onto cybernetic steel—as bayard steel _guts_ through the caging ribs of the next oncomer and Keith reels his attacker into the line of another lasershot.

So it goes. Bodies topple into place like shields. His bayard snarls vine-white under the dark. The last blow sings where it cracks bone into a wet splintering. 

Night and shrouding leaves tear the colors out; shadows drain to leave only silhouettes and sound in a littering of sprawled bodies. One guard's struggling to wrench herself up, sobs out when her wrist twists and crumples. Across the clearing, the bayard's flashed to the stranger's throat—red now, blackening, its viscuous light quenched and scarring. 

The stranger steps back; the blade's point tracks its retreat. In the hood's hollow, the smile's long gone. "You are the paladins of Voltron," it says.

Not a breath sways Keith's hand. "One step closer to him," he says, "and it's the last one you take."

"Is that a dare?"

" _Don't try me._ "

Thunder.

Through the stillness, Keith breathes out to exhaust and control. "If you think I can't handle reinforcements," he says, "we can prove it. In ten minutes, Red'll be loose and the Black Lion'll be here. Tell anyone who's coming to stand down. _Now_."

"Oh," the figure says, "but I believe that I've called for all the help I need."

Keith's frame cuts to stone; the fury of two lions roils in his ears. Shiro steps forward. "Right now," he says, "I think we'd all be more comfortable if we started with a few introductions."

But the stranger's pushing back its hood. Metal stretches where flesh should lie, a jagged stitchery from chin to ear. In the pearling light, her lips are battered steel; her jaw gleams like a sword's edge, and across the shining stroke of her cheek spins the insignia which had marked their mission brief. "Paladins," their client proclaims above her broken troop. Her fearless blind eyes burn like flares. "You're _late_."  


# *

  
_We'll speak at the camp_ , their new host said; but _camp_ seems to be a word that's slipped and cracked in translation. Their path darts through the clustering woods, coaxes them down to a valley. Lamps spring up along the way, thin white flames in iron-wrought cages. The camp flares after: a sprawling bower veined with paths, screened by tangling shadows and thickets black as charring. Seasons of night-dark trees have lent their branches to bridges and arching tunnels; a lacquered shroud of leaves fends away the ever-beating stars. The houses have knitted willow reeds into walls, looped them open for windows round as dewdrops. Children go clambering in and out, shrieking and shrilling as the squadron passes under; they clop across the branches in a race between cloven feet and tawny bright talons. In the high, farthest folds of the valley, a spiral of white-scarved guards stand unraveling clouds of blossoms from a ghostly cottonwood.

On and on they walk, staggered by the line of sullen, raw-footed soldiers behind them. Through his soles sings some deepening electric hum. At the valley's sunken heart, the single footpath splits into a thousand: wending up delicate, sloping trunks or into the gaping earth, each moss-ridden and gleaming, trampled underfoot to glassy shells and crumbs. Their host stops—her head twists to the prick of an ear. "Come along. _This_ way."

Her turn's too abrupt; Shiro startles, his fingers still splayed open against Keith's spine. In the gap, a guard slams her spear behind his heel.

The valley holds steady, steady—but the squadron shatters in every direction, driven apart by a sheer, savage lunge like an animal breaking its leash. In one jumbled heartbeat, the guard goes stammering back with her eyes flinched wide beneath the mask, one, two, _three_ —and then Shiro's broken between them, his frame a heavy shield against Keith's glare and his bladed edges. " _Easy_ there," he says, and Keith's attention lashes over him, surges from crown to soles and breaks like static.

Five, seven, ten. The bower's hush stretches. Without a word, Keith jerks. One shoulder rolls, answering some unsettled ache; his arm drops into a pendulum swing. The soldier's litany, kept in heartbeat-time: _live now, stay down, fix when safe._ Practical.

Shiro bows his head.

They're drawn to a tent drawn into a circle of traincars, glassy against the bower's shadows. Its pillars are translucent rods; its anchoring cords glisten pale against sleet-thin cloth hemmed with scrawling, mazy patterns dense as ink. Inside, a lamp warms in every corner in the small antechamber. The light remakes the tables and plump, glossy sofas to sunstruck crystal; each sings with its own thin, artificial brilliance. 

Their host, too, seems transformed, a fever made new again under the lanterns. Her shawl spills loose, metal jaw gleaming. With an old familiarity, she shimmers from entrance to armchair in a firefly beat and drapes herself back into the cushions. Even on her elbows, she keeps the pricked-up watchfulness of an uncaged thing, a figurine which shattered its glass display long ago and taught itself the steps into the bright world. Her heels kick up over the chair's plush arm; she's all flicking diamondspun nails and wrists as she settles into lounging. Shiro glances sidelong—but Keith's rooted by the tentflap, all knotted arms and brows, every inch devoted to his impression of a Rhoenese tree. 

Alone, he clears his throat. "So," Shiro says as the last sentinel drifts out. "You sent the call to Voltron."

"Oh, of course. You're from the backwaters." Their host flicks tongue over teeth, thoughtful. Her accent turns and wheels like a gull's cry over the translator's murmuring, glass to brass. She bends a shining knee, denting the chair's sheen, and flips a silver-tangled wrist. A scaled tendril snakes from the underside to fish in a nearby bowl; it snaps a pipe into her waiting fingers. This she hooks between her teeth, flashing silver over its pale stem. "Rhoen sent an emergency signal _months_ ago."

Keith sweeps a look from the tent's hollow to the brimming settlement outside. Neither his frown nor his tension eases. "Doesn't look like you're missing a lot of people."

The host glowers; her needling bite pricks the metal with each puff. "Chaining a society out of evolution's reach," she drawls, "is worse than any population loss."

Keith opens his mouth. Quicker, Shiro says, "You're going to have to explain that to us."

Temper levers her onto an elbow. Another kick spills her robes down from knee to hip, baring the silvery length of her leg with all the carelessness of a child. Her eyes glimmer like daylight through ice. "You understand, we aren't without resources. Our saplings learn the backwater equations in their cradles. We alone, out of the hundred worlds surrounding us, closed our gates against Zarkon the invader and kept him at bay. The Galra Empire fell some time ago—we're aware. Now, with its fall, Rhoen is _ready_ to return to the universe. If our world has made significant advancements on its own—" 

She snaps her fingers. At once, the tent plunges black. Through the dark whirls a reel of images.

"Only think of what we could make in cooperation with others," their host says, soft into the dust.

Rhoen netted in lights and pale signals; cloven children with broken horns kicking a gaudy ball through the mud. A shrouded dais, risen from a tiled floor clotted with people on their knees. Diagrams and old holos flurry around them in grieving constellations. Sympathy beats beneath his ribs—but that's reflex more than real feeling: this isn't a show designed to captivate alien soldiers.

Keith says, "So what's stopping you?"

She taps the pipe against a lip. "Call it tradition. Since we raised them to power, each of our planet's oracles has, in her turn, foretold destruction within the century for any who dare to breach Rhoen's shields. If our faith means anything, it must mean that we believe in her—and so in the best of faith, we've dallied under our cloak for millennia. Eight thousand years in wait—and I alone have raised my voice in opposition. How long have we lived in exile, barricaded from flight, from new stars, with our dreams stranded from the universe? So I told her, a hundred years past," their host says. She motions outward. "And you see our result."

Flat-browed, Keith looks around. "Are you talking about the tent?" he says, and narrows his eyes. "It feels air-conditioned."

"She _banished_ me. I saw her grown and named, I alone—" Her lips pinch. "It's irrelevant. She has condemned everyone in my sect with me, root and branch alike, to poverty; she's stripped our names from the data-C, cut us from the breeding pods at Ferengi and every city in the nation. Without some intervention, we'll wither in these filthy backwoods. All of our knowledge will die with our silicon and ash."

"You want us to mediate peace for you," Shiro says, and she turns her marbled eyes on him.

"Listen closely, boy," their host says. "You are not to misunderstand me. Each oracle rules for a thousand years according to a thing we call the mandate of the sky. Armed by fate, she guides Rhoen without fault—every injury fated and diminished, no pain undeserved, no harms that we cannot foresee. The mandate chooses its own candidates, blesses them anew with the turn of each century. Archives abound with tales of those who won the mandate before the oracles came to us, and what befell those sad pretenders after they betrayed it and were abandoned. No oracle has ever lost the mandate's favor. If it were only a concession that I needed, I could beg on behalf of my people and see them return to the fold. But that will not win Rhoen its place in the greater world. Now, for all its glory and foresight, we have no record that the mandate's anything more than an unthinking magnet. It chooses the way a compass chooses. If we trust the records and think of it as inanimate, unsentient, then it can be moved as any person chooses to move it. For _me_ to steal the thing would wreak an everlasting war, split the great capital of Xindi down to its heartwood. However—"

"If someone from the outside," Keith says, cold, "steals it. That'd be an excuse, right? One way or another, the whole planet'd have to start watching the rest of the universe again. It'd keep Rhoen together—just you against the universe."

Their host strips out the pipe. Her sigh burns white as old ash. " _Someone from the outside?_ Paladin, I could have collared and broken a thousand smugglers in the time that it took for two of you to find your way to me. You'll notice that I _didn't_ choose to sell myself." Each word bells out; beneath them, her gaze kindles like winterstruck glass. "I don't want war. But I don't expect your trust or your mercy without reason. I'm choosing to plead my case before those who murdered the Galra Empire's final hope. If the paladins of Voltron will not intervene on behalf of our sky, then I will leave the oracle to her place and live the rest of my span in the stillness of the undying wood."

Her head turns, searching their faces in a filmy, unseeing sweep. "Or shall I kneel after all?" their host says, dreamy through her smoke. "Old, old legend holds that the true paladins could not be bought—but bribery doesn't always come in property." A glance lashes the gap between them, settles on Keith's end of the tent. Softer, she says, "I could show you—"

"We don't need _anything_ from you."

"Keith," Shiro says, and nets a startled flicker before Keith jerks away. Still his eyes hold on Keith's downturned face. "You've handled more diplomatic missions than I have lately. It's up to you."

But that's gaunt dishonesty—he doesn't know anything about what Keith's done in their lapsed empty year, what their host means by her sidelong laugh when she looks at him. The quiet stretches, beat after beat; Keith's shoulders bow beneath its grey weight.

In the end, it's Shiro that he faces—a shuttered look drawn blind, his lips pressed thin against some uncertain sound. "I say we do it," Keith says, low. "We're here anyway."

Delighted, their host slings her pipe away. Smoke tufts and crumbles where it arcs through the air; it clatters into the bowl like ice. "Seal your pact to me, then," she says, and raises her wrists. Her mouth twists up, a cut-pearl curve. "Let me bless your steps in this world, and bind us until this last dictatorship falls."

Shiro palms the secondary sensor at his hip. No thrum of a detonation count, no shield—but that doesn't mean there's _nothing_. "Keith," he says again, a jarring warning.

But Keith's crossing the tent's illuminated floor to clasp her fingers. 

A tendril sweeps over his nails and knuckles, wraps his wrist like it means to tattoo and pry into vein and marrow alike. "Steady," their host murmurs, close enough that their translator stutters metallic and too late. The tendril ropes tight, biting white trails into skin. Keith wrenches, but the leash of it holds, and the host's singing three long, ululating notes in a cycle, a flurrying hollow birdsong while the tendril twists and glows, clinging until Keith _yanks_ out of reach.

The gap flays every last sound into stillness. 

Shiro's at his side; but Keith doesn't look up: sliding fingers down his wrist to the point where the skin's still gleaming bare of any bruising. "What—"

"You've taken my blessing," their host says. Her voice's shaking, seismic with triumph. "And so I accept your pledge, too, paladins of Voltron. Let's save this world."  


# *

  
After: they're given a guest's reception, feted and feasted and shown to their own shining tent. The lions come to roost at the edge of camp, hooded under the forest's black finery. A crane-legged girl comes running with a pot of microbotic salve— _for treatment,_ the accompanying note says; _we'll need every hand ready in the capital. I won't take a useless ally._ Reports of the clearing's aftermath must have snaked through the settlement; every attendant looks down when Keith strides by. Shiro asks for the local records, historical files, and gets them; he keeps his eyes on the glinting holos as Keith slouches in his own bower, smoothing the salve over a scrape, cursing in mutters at some point far beneath his shoulderblade.

He's weathered worse on his own by now. This is only one mission, and Shiro is not a resource to trust. It's kinder not to offer.

Their host must send her messages by night: at sunrise, the settlement stirs to shouting. The oracle's holographic answer has been blown large under a folding tree; their host's striding and coiling beneath it, tearing through the kind of rage which skewers each sentence into a question. _Xindi recalls Paklar?_ she roars, blazing and blaring. _In your honor, we'll begin with the Wounding Rite? See your way back to us?_ She gnashes at the display—swipes and balls it down to photons, hurls its tiny projector through a precise arc into the nearest lamp. The flame swallows its catch, thundering white.

Her circling guards turn their backs to her snarling and pacing; their blinks keep time as she hisses a string of mazy, intricate things to tabards and trunks alike. In the tent, their translator sprays sparks when Keith tries to feed it a few of her choicer words.

Never mind the tantrum. By noon, the camp's frothing and bustling beneath the wood's brimming shadows. Messenger after messenger comes tapping their heels before the paladins' tent until Keith stalks out to meet one. _The lady will see you_ , each squeaks, swaying in place with braids and knives. _Come along, come along!_

Rhoenese grammar, Shiro learns, has no space for a conditional _will_.

The _lady_ , their host, recovers by the early afternoon. Her preparations scorch through the rest of the day: choosing her retinue, arguing through a diplomatic order of introductions when the oracle calls them to a private audience, thrashing the gaps out of the paladins' cover story, settling quarrels and judgments wherever they strike. Adjutants go scuttling in every direction, toting striped, silky banners above their heads as they go; assistants invade the guest-tent, sweeping last-minute translations and records over every surface under Shiro's bemused eye. Evidently his request endeared him to someone. 

Under the ghostly warmth of the crowding spirit-lamps, he listens and watches: the way acolytes sail between the pinching rows of assembled tables without ever touching; how pens arc and waltz through the air from hand to hand, a hive's worth of memory mapping layouts to each major place of worship; the Earth analogues for Rhoenese concepts. _Priest_ , the translator spits after a tangling, overwhelmed interval with their host's silkspun title. It suffers a little more with the maps: _temple_ , he hears, but a student crowned with a circlet of braids sings _teh-mpluh_ again to its speakers, hisses her own disapproval when it chimes out a different word than the original that he'd fed to it. 

_Chapel_ , Shiro suggests as shouts whirlwind between paladin and priest in another tent. _Shrine_.

 _Theatre_ , the translator trills, and the student's frown breaks into triumph.

("You are our first outsiders since the Galra sought to breach our borders! Even though you visit in your capacity as accidental travelers rather than paladins, your very presence makes this a political matter—every element must properly convey our subservience. Only three thousand years ago, her letter would have run up to thirty conditions for our arrival— _still_ , now, no ecclesiastical trial would find her out of bounds for asking so little of us! While you slept, we reviewed the data on file on the servers of your lions—"

"You didn't get _this_ data from Red," Keith says. "How'd you break into the lions?"

"You have my due apologies," the priest says with her traditional whiplash sweetness. "I understood that as our allies, you would cooperate with us to the fullest degree."

"It's not actual cooperation if you're just _taking_ whatever you need instead of asking!"

"Is it a matter of modesty? The incoming transmissions aren't properly encrypted. They seem adequate examples of formalwear for a backland species. I have reviewed several of the samples taken and I must confess that I see no great difference in the impression presented by its usual wearers and the one that you would present if you chose to wear—"

"That's a _miniskirt,_ " Keith says, outraged.)

Left to his own devices, Shiro props himself onto a brittle wheeling stool. He too goes to work—sweeps the translator over plotted layouts of Xindi temples, sounds out the tabled transcripts of popular recipes, taps unrecognised compounds into an index to check for compatability with human digestion. A drone could do five times his work in a slice of the time—but there's a relief to drudgery: the ache in his wrist as he angles a scanning light over each line, the sequence of code after code, chugging and keying data the same way he had in a cramped grey lab left years and stars ago. 

From time to time, a thoughtful acolyte's scrawled context into the margins. Through their crabbed inkblotches, Shiro learns: that Rhoen's continents have been quartered into seasons, tethered to a semi-stable temperature range through a system proposed by some bright-wired Xindi student centuries ago. That Rhoen's primary ally flirted for a time with the concept of corpoforming their shared descendants into a silicon-based lifeform. Such discussions came to an end with the first oracle's rise but left traces in their culinaries via an affinity for fermented ash drinks, which the silicon-based are notorious for savoring. That the oracle's rite comes to Xindi once every century under a syzygy of moons lined one after another. In a celebratory year, the capital feasts and unravels into celebrations. Supplicants go wandering from tower to tower, armed with paintbrushes and flowers, waltzing and confessing and wrecking, crowns and sandals marching in the same surge—but these are flourishes to the main show. The performances are the heart, the constant: six stages played over two months. One to each theatre, rites scheduled at the oracle's unguessable whim.

Shiro reads, reads, reads like he hasn't done since his cadet days. He spares a glance only when a shadow parts the tentflap. Outside the sky's guttering low, lanterns wakening with the watery glimmer of faraway stars. Even the bustling acolytes have cleared out, hauling their tables with them. In spite of himself, of the mission, his mouth crooks. "I was starting to wonder if I should be worried," he says. A drowsy ache's churning awake along his nape: the dull prickling of long reading hours. For one heartbeat, the world hangs in suspended golden quiet. "Did you figure out what we're going to wear for the trip?"

"This," Keith says, in the voice of something long dead. 

Somewhere in the rioting preparations, the priest had found a way to stitch Keith into a suit: a fitted high-cut waistcoat, slim trousers and a jacket with notched lapels, some kind of glinting near-silk material that clings to his legs and wrists. Daylight would scorch away its subtleties, scour the gleam of it to some harsh black; but the bower's softening lanterns coax out strange, warm colors: red as good wine, red as the first dusk they'd caught on the shore, begging to be rubbed between thumb and fingers. 

Years long past had tucked memories that he'd never asked for into the reeling images behind his eyes: even now, he knows the length of Keith's stride, the lean lines of his calves and thighs. It's a different thing to have the knowledge remade, cloth clinging to his hips in a coy show.

Shiro opens his mouth, closes it. Opens it again and coughs.

"They made one for you too," Keith says, disgruntled. He stalks over to the table, slouches and glowers over Shiro's collection of paper towers with another armful of draping silk. " _You_ can wear the tie. What?"

 _What_. It's a begging moment, the kind that spreads like a fever and invites by all that's left unsaid. The movement'd be easy: one palm to each hip, a casual measure of the sleek, gleaming fabric. _You really did get taller_ , and beneath him lies the proof: with the new stretch of a hipbone, body warmth burning against him like a new flare. 

No.

He isn't being fair—but better these leaf-dimmed fantasies than the crags and creases of memories past, the creatures who'd turned their eyes up to the Black Lion when he'd landed, their mouths stitched and gaunt with hope, knives still drying while they chattered to him: _Is it over? Have the Galra filth surrendered? Is it all over? Really?_

_But why?_

"That's not really a look I ever thought I'd see you pull off," Shiro tells him, honest. "You look good."

Keith furrows his brows, frowns at his ankles as if Shiro's voice might have reforged their crooking lines. A pinch plucks the hem of his jacket; his wrist flashes, quick and pale. "I look like a penguin."

"Then you must be the fastest penguin the Earth's ever produced. I'd be proud to put that on my resume."

"I'll see if I can fit that after _saved the Earth eight hundred and seventy-six times_."

"I didn't know you were counting."

" _Lance_ ," Keith says, bleak and simple.

The stool stops on its wheels; a grin flicks the corners of Shiro's mouth. He tilts an elbow against the lamp-warmed table. "Is he charging on Voltron's behalf?"

"He keeps a _diary_. We were stuck in traffic just outside of Henderson and he started reading it. Out loud. From the beginning. Here," he adds, and pushes a heap of black and crumpled mahogany into Shiro's startled arms. " I got them to make something with real pockets. The sooner we get this over with, the sooner we can go."

Lantern-light's dripping gold down Keith's throat, into the soft hollow where his shirtcollar parts. Axles squeak beneath him. "You're in charge," Shiro says, and stands to make his way behind the separating screen.

Ice-winged things flare across the paper panel, crane-boned with eyes chipped out of frozen ink. Between their scrawling flights, a silhouette slouches against the table and props his chin on a wrist. In shadow, Keith says, "I don't think she expected us to say yes."

Maybe she hadn't. History still shines out of every look she casts at their backs: a hundred years of choosing to believe that no one would ever come to save those who'd stayed in her service. Once he might have imagined Keith's answer to that, the way his mouth might work through the words, a sour-tongued boy growing into a crown of his own—but time's reshaped the distance between them into a livid, living world. He has no right to chase its orbit.

"We're here now," Shiro says. He flicks open the first clasp of his jacket, tugs at a snarled tear in the cloth before he undoes the rest. Jacket, shirt, trousers slither to the floor. "Within reason, we'll do everything we can for them, Keith."

"I know that," Keith says. "I just—"

Shiro waits. "Just?"

"Forget it."

His shadow's settled. Behind the screen, Shiro bows his head. Without a word, he tugs up the trousers first—the same cloth as Keith's, silken but sulky: it barely yields when he tugs at a hem. The zipper slides up, clasps each claw. The new shirt drapes on, sleeve by sleeve, buttons glinting beneath his appreciative thumbing as he slings the tie over his shoulders for last—

Shiro stops.

"This might sound bad," he says, "but I think I could use some help."

Silence.

The shadow stirs in a slow stretch. A handful of heartbeats pour through the gap before Keith comes around the screen.

Shiro raises both wrists, all forlorn surrender. His shirt's gaping open around his chest; pale buttons gleam like laughing eyes in a string. "I forgot that buttons came in different sizes," he starts, rueful, and stops again. Keith's jerked stiff, staring at his face with the kind of brutal focus that only comes by rejecting every other detail around them.

On Sjoumer, the leaders had sent a physician to him after the mission: a narrow-winged figure who'd pressed an intricacy of devices over his body, magnets and radar-pens and a net strung with black suction cups. They'd given him a panic bar to clutch, let him marvel over its metallic coiling as they numbed ligaments and muscle and nerve to misty consciousness, asked him moment by moment if the inspection could continue. _How marvelous a species,_ they said, _to knit their own flesh back into place with hardly a seam. And to do it with only one heart, with a circulatory system dependent on poisonous elements! Is this a vein or another scar, as you call them? Do they run beneath the flesh, healing internal damage? Remarkable._ Such childish, helpless wonder.

"Keith," he says. Light cracks Keith's glassy stare.

"It's fine," he says, too rough. "I've got it."

He steps forward, catching shirtfolds and yanking them into starching lines. Without a word, he bows to it: looping buttons one after another, steel-browed intent and motion electric in his knuckles and nails. Shiro shifts his weight; a thumb grazes a patch that's scarred in knots above his ribs—and Keith's fists shiver and bunch as a breath drags hot between them. _It's fine, it doesn't hurt_ —but he can't say that now. Nobody had ever thought to teach Keith his graces; still, there's something close in the way he handles the trembling moment: measured as he tugs the shirt away from the brambling scars, too precarious to touch.

That, at least, hasn't changed.

"This is what I get for staying away," he says, though it's nonsense, meaningless and half-laughing—anything to ease the strain binding Keith's shoulders. "First, I miss out on our big fight. Now I literally can't dress myself without you."

Keith's head flashes up. His eyes glitter in fixed points, hard as stars, as they had been in that stroke of dusk when vines had gone writhing over the Red Lion's carcass. _Wrong move_ , over and over since they landed—and maybe he's been getting things wrong from the start.

"You really don't _get_ it," Keith says. His fingertips hook against the white, snapping the last button into place—and then a fist's crumpling fabric, twisting tight, hauling Shiro down to kiss him.  


# *

  
Barely fifteen make it into the priest's final retinue: Keith and Shiro in suits and satin-lined coats, and a fistful of acolytes with skills left unnamed. He counts them off in the waiting throng at dawn: a row of iron brows and jutting chins, hands soft as water-worn soap. The wounded come crawling in their white slings and violet tabards, still reeking of sweat and steel and the forest's tarred-sweet strangeness; they keep their distance, warded off by Keith's black, sleep-gritty staring.

Bustling attendants draw a sleek-winged arrow of a hovercraft out from the tunnels; the priest cocks a hip, whirls the keys around a polished nail, and smiles.

The line files in; the ship rises into a whistling wind. Its thrusters burn steady as bulbs as they bolt across the treetops, stirring leaves in their race against the ship's long shadow. The landscape unravels all at once. In the drip of a heartbeat, the air frosts. Daylight thins to a smudge between the drowsing clouds. The wood's black, skeletal summer strips out of their lungs; sooty trees bow and wither, knitted over with skeins of snow. Through the filtering windshield, mountains gnash through the horizon and grind its lingering colors to powdered ice. The ship scales up the first pathless slope in an eager surge, hull skimming frost. Cold alchemy churns the winds overhead into a ceaseless howl. Shiro grimaces; Keith hunches; the acolytes nest close to a blaring heater. Only the priest's eyes stay anchored on the navigation: the green gridded map where the ship's black speck beats closer and closer to a white target-point. 

It's an hour before the acolytes lift their heads: looking up between the peaks to the stony capital walls.

Their craft sinks into a shallow drift, inches from a pooled obsidian landing furred with a night's worth of ice. A sentinel stands at either side of a gate thorned with ice; their bushy tails sway beneath each green velvet longcoat. They neither stir nor call out as the gathering trickles out of the ship—until the priest emerges.

In an instant, each sentinel's slung a cannon over their shoulders; their gloved fingers locked against a gleaming trigger. Light strikes off their crystal wrists, the blaze of ice laid over silicon and steel.

They aren't alive.

But the priest marches forward—rubs an insolent heel against the landing. When she pulls back, white's crumbled and smudged the gloss. Her battered lips stretch, molten-wide. "Well?" she says. 

Mirror-eyed, the automatons wheel their heads together; a heartbeat, and they salute.

"Xindi's fate acknowledges the returning priest and her subservients. Come."

Shiro chafes down his arm against a shiver—but their overcoats flare against a breeze, and warmth puffs through the cuffs. Keith's already strides ahead, a shadow cutting through the white.

Xindi wears its perpetual winter like a crown: all bone-bright points and crenellations, stained glass stages where holograms linger to pace and plead, quick as magpies in their lacquer and silver finery. The streets burn newly white underfoot, and tightlipped lamps glitter like spring buds under a surge of frost. Watchtowers sway through the distance, pocked with lanterns, black charring through the pale. Under the skeletal spires, crowds lumber black tracks across the snow in coats stitched with embroidery and snow. Trailing the sentinels, they're led along white-crusted avenues and through the square with its wind-whittled towers and clocks belling their resonant notes into the wintry air. Faces blink and ripple in mute witness, fogging the bleary windowpanes as they pass. 

The low light stirs; their path winds out to a cathedral's intricate cluster of towers and painted arches, barred behind black gates. Guard after green guard falls in behind their guides, marching up the white steps. Without a missed beat, the ranks turn and weave from a herding line into a corridor lined mechanical soldiers. 

" _Be forgiven_ ," they intone, with a choir's relentless single voice.

The square's emptied out.The priest steps forward, step after step cutting through the white. On the cathedral's snowy flight, she clasps her throat in a formal gesture; alone, she kneels.

The gates tumble apart like a whalebone cage stripped bare.

Footfall echoes footfall. The carved doors hang open, a hollow frame to the white silhouette pacing from the velvet darkness. She's a round figure, powdered and silk-wrapped, ice-fringed lashes beating dusty in a pearl of a face, her wild seafoam hair teased into a radiant crown. Her ears glimmer with tiny chandeliers; a pierced sigil gleams from an inked brow, too small to read. Light winds her fingers, beads and drips from her wrists—but that isn't light: it's ice bound to flesh.

The oracle of Xindi's no warmer than her automatons.

"Long have we felt your absence, priest of Paklar," the oracle says.

"Not that much," the priest says, each word gone maplesweet. "For wouldn't the very fate and spirit of Xindi have granted providence, if you'd needed me so? But your call humbled me; I am honored to return and to serve peace again beneath you."

Xindi smiles, a demure crease. She holds out her wrists; white quakes and froths up between her cupped hands, bristling into shape against the stark cartography of her veins. The priest's jaw tenses. Up the steps she minces; with a spindling hand, she takes a full mask from the oracle's wintry grip. Not a nail grazes skin. Before the guards and her own gathered staff, she fits it over her long nose, her dented, battered lips, and sinks to press her head along the tiles.

"You are as welcome as you ever were," the oracle says, husky as a struck chord. "This is the home of all fate on Rhoen; we take in any who would grow their roots in Xindi, and guard their paths as we would our own."

"Welcome," Paklar says, "but not familiar. Spare me a little of that famous mercy, sky-majesty—let me look on your greatness at the next rite, no sooner."

" _Sky-majesty_ ," Xindi says. The wind snatches the hiss from her lips.

A flake flurries down from the scraped-bone sky.

Some signal must snake through the gathering. Guard after guard peels from each line, crunching their green steps through the ice. The oracle lingers on the open stair, studies each exit before she turns away, too, vanishing into the dark of the cathedral's hall. 

Only after the last shadow sinks away does the priest's head rise. She strips the mask away. Frost's trickled over her fine brow, blurred the metal along her cheek, threaded glass into her dark hair. Her fingers grit and tremble against the snow as her wrists buckle, as she snaps a fanged hiss into her own shoulder. Twice she fails to push herself up. At once, acolytes hurry forward—but she bats their frantic hands away before they touch. Some invisible force _hefts_ her to her feet; the priest twists in the air before she bows, staggers forward onto stone.

Her chin dips; she chafes the shivering from her fingers.

"The third ritual," the priest says at last; her voice's broken from storm to mist again. "Paladin. It'll begin when our two moons crest tonight. Look for the Theatre of the Wounded. Ask any citizen; they'll know the way. Don't take offense if they won't speak with you otherwise." She bares a winterlit string of teeth. "They think you're unconsecrated."

The words slur with cold, grinding as if through broken glass; her unseeing eyes cling and clasp at the cathedral's closing doors. He knows that clawing stare—he must've looked at the arena's guards the same way, once.

Shiro says, "Do you want us to stay with you?"

"For what purpose? To _help?_ " A glassy laugh rattles her. "What happens in the city of deathless Xindi is as fate proscribes. Offer your services to no one here, paladin. You'll only insult them." Her nails are still biting along skin gone pale as ice; tendons work beneath her steeled jaw, clenching down another shiver. " _Go_."

Shiro steps back—remembers then to look around. 

Keith's already gone.  


# *

  
_The Theatre of the Wounded._ It's a gaudy wave of a name, stutters short of _pretentious_ because it's true: a slouching black gargoyle of a building, all holoscreen windows and old steel arches, circled by a moat's worth of ice-wilted bushes. Frost's blanketed whatever blossoms they carried, and night remakes the rest. In the dark, the hulking thickets brace up like the steel of some hard-shouldered sentinel; their clumsy shadows gnash at the glittering, unbroken winter, hungry for passerby. Its courtyard hides from the ceaseless ice behind steel fencing over mismatched stones; the latticework shivers in the dusk, a gaudy war of rust and paint. Beneath the mottled metal, carved doors fold like wings sagging after some last desperate flight.

The foyer inside's all wan luxury, golden and warm as summer with grey velvet gleaming threadbare underfoot. At once, his jacket softens its bristling against the cold. Trickling in through a slim river of visitors, Shiro follows the queue to some bowlegged table piled with masks. His fingers stiffen, but he plucks some filigreed half-mask off a limping table—a plain black domino. He presses it over his eyes and heads down the lamplit hall, towards the silver-striped staircase.

It's neither a chapel nor a stage.

The theatre's a tiered chessboard grown out of a dance hall. A glow rises from the circling walls. Its vast dome cages a series of platforms, each of which rises and falls one after another on a slow mechanical tide. Steel rafters split its vaulted ceiling into panels. Each new frame seethes with nonsensical designs: clipped wings skewed and twisted into fangs, webbed fingers half-claws over a palm pooling with ink, a robed figure with chains looped over each shoulder, holding it fast against a rough-sketched continent. Some faint incense wafts down to him, a scent like copper, candlewax, faded oleander.

Only the Rhoenese wear colors in the capital: violets and roses bloom across the black tiles as the supplicants wander from stage to sighing stage. A cluster's chirping and murmuring by the buffet table, cakes whirling sugarspun over every braided head. Others have swept their chrysanthemum-frill dresses over to an empty pedestal. Shiro turns from the crowd; he crosses each platform as it creaks and surges under his heel until he reaches the room's far end. 

Safe from dancing and feasts alike, one figure's slouched against the paneled alcove, every inch a fearsome beast beneath his sleek, shadowy suit.

"Keith," he says. The beast's head flicks up, startled, and becomes a boy again, black brows and crossed arms against a pearled wall.

"Sorry," Shiro says, smiling. _You disappeared on me._ It coils his tongue, then evaporates—there are some lines that even thought won't cross. He spares a glance around as he settles back too, folds his arms. "I... guess we won't have to worry about standing out. See anything interesting?"

Keith stares: first at the tides of peacock robes along the swaying floors, then at the windowless walls, the single door winging out of reach as each platform plunges again, one after another in a wave. "No one here's armed." He jerks his chin, grinds his palm against the edge of his red-lined mask. "I sent Pidge's microbot batch out to do a sweep—but I don't see any guards watching the exits, either. If it's here, all we have to do's get a line on what part of the theatre has actual security."

"The layouts they gave us didn't come with a rundown of Xindi's security measures. Pidge's good, but that doesn't guarantee that her technology can detect every threat."

He tenses, elbows jutting. "They're still using tech. This isn't magic. We don't have to know what it is; we just have to know it's _there_."

"Normally I'd agree with you—but from what the priest told us, we probably can't risk more than one shot. There's a whole culture on the line."

" _I know that._ "

The alcove roils with his echo, all the thunder of a curdling empty year.

"Of course you do," Shiro says, after a beat. "All right. How do you think we should take it?"

He keeps asking the wrong questions; this one plucks some chord between Keith's shoulders until it sings with tension. "It's just a mission," he says, quick and too hushed. His eyes trail down with an ebbing platform, where a cloud of supplicants is storming the silverwrought buffet. "Right? We're on a planet that the Galra didn't even get to _hit_ —we don't have time to find out every detail. She just needs us to steal something and get out of here with it. We can clear this place tonight."

It's a contradiction in terms: _I say we do it_ still crystallized between them, laid against the stripped, raw desperation beneath the mask. He's brittle-spined, bearing up against some incoming impact as they have been since the landing, since the moment he'd torn past the paper screen. Shiro's smiling, crooked and meaningless; he can't help it. "And this is just about the planet."

"She's not the only one who's asking Voltron for help," Keith says, with a paladin's authority. "Even if Voltron's over, it doesn't mean we get to stop answering."

He stops. 

A black-steel hand presses against the wall beside his head; with care, Shiro settles the warmer one on the opposite side, a casual caging. "I try not to interfere too much," he says to Keith's stark staring, his jaw drawn sharp, "so I don't plan to do this more than once. Tell me _no_ and I'll drop it. Do you want to talk about it?"

 _It._ The mission. The way he'd fought in the clearing, a siege in the body of a boy. The salt still stinging on his lips, heat clinging through the city winter.

His eyes flicker beneath the brocade; his mouth parts on a shallow warming sigh. "No," Keith says. His fist locks in Shiro's jacket.

Shiro meets him halfway, breathless and bruising. A bite scrapes red into his lip, prying his mouth open just to string kiss into kiss—like he knows no better, like they never have. He's got a hand at Keith's nape before the thought even hits. A thumb smoothes the hollow beneath his ear where his rough dark hair runs thin and fine. He leans into it, clinging and yielding, urgent until black sputters beneath his eyelids—until Keith's exhale cracks on his tongue, soundless desperation.

"Keith," he says—presses the name into his ear, the corner of his jaw, murmuring slow until he can feel the shiver swell beneath it. Beneath the theatre's waxy scent, Keith breathes like steel, salt, and ash—the old reek of war. "I'm not—I _can't_ come back to Earth with you. I need you to understand that."

It's not the right thing to say, as it never is—but something in the words seems to click. Keith's palm flexes against his throat; beneath the feral mask, his eyes brighten like coals. 

"Then let's make this count."  


# *

  
There's a door in the alcove, a carved, discreet opening which deepens into a paneled corridor; they go stumbling through it into some hollowed musty backstage glinting with abandoned props. Keith's all whipcord brutality, grinding him into a tasseled curtain's sweep with knuckles knotting over satin, hauling him down through wet, bruising kisses in a chain, a single breath dragged out between them until it splits into a shiver.

" _Easy_ ," Shiro murmurs—but his breath's guttering, jagged, and the next crush of mouth against mouth smears it to a slick, distracted pant. "Slow _down_ , Keith. By the looks of things, they won't be hitting the main ritual for a while. We should take the chance to—"

But it's Keith's palm framing his jaw, all calluses and intent, scathing fingernails. It's Keith's mouth grating a faint, desperate _sound_ into his teeth, Keith's lean familiar body tipped against him, worn thin enough to palm the jut of each hipbone through the silk-slim fabric. He doesn't mean to smooth and ruck away the sleek jacketsleeve, clench his fist against the white cloth until the bone creaks—doesn't mean to slide a thumb over his chin, tuck the curl of his fingers under his jaw, tilt him up until Keith's shuddering a sheer animal noise onto his tongue—

_Make this count._

All words evaporate.

Heartbeats pour through in a torrent. Music comes filtering through the gaping door, a dim, colorless chant swelling beneath the ripple of dusty strings.

A squeak.

His eyes lid open. He's got a palm over Keith's nape, cradling fingers buried in the thick of his hair as metal closes against his hip. Inches from his lashes, a firefly of a thing's perched on Keith's ear, the jauntiest of jewels. Its filigree wings shrill; a faint spark _snaps_ from its mandibles. 

The kiss cracks into a scowl. Keith pinches at his ear, but the bot scuds away—hangs in the air just out of reach, a quavering pinprick alarm. His brows twitch as his mouth works. "Security's low everywhere," Keith says, with wet, flushed lips.

Red's still stained high along his cheekbones; Shiro's fingers thrum with the memory of a felt pulse. "What?"

It's the wrong question and the wrong sound, drunk too soon off their husky, shared warmth. Keith's glance flicks from the microbot and back again; his eyelids sink, too. "In the theatre," he says, as he steps closer, leans between Shiro's legs. His jaw works, but his breath's all heat where it puffs and stutters against the seam of Shiro's lips. "If the oracle brought the mandate, she's not watching it."

"Mm." He shifts his weight; his throat flexes and jumps, tuning its cords back to something like strategy beneath Keith's black focus. "I'm guessing she wouldn't expect anyone to try and steal it tonight. Should we—?"

"There's an elevator somewhere back here. The bot's got the codes."

Shiro glances down the narrow space to a cloudy ivory arch at the far end: sliding doors studded with the wavering shimmer of a keypad and a glaring locklight. It's hard to think past the proximity, Keith's thigh under the silk, radiant with warmth. "We might," he says, "have some trouble explaining how we got in."

"That only matters if they actually ask about it. We just have to make sure they think they know what we're up to."

The words come steady, resonant; his hand's starry over Shiro's chest. Shiro stares. "You think they're going to buy that the first alien tourists on Rhoen in eight thousand years just... snuck off to make out?" 

"I figured it out on the ride," Keith says in a leaden voice. "Paklar was showing me _miniskirts_ for a reason. The lions' quintessence is entangled—it means they bounce the same transmission signals even when they're galaxies apart. She didn't get that data from _inside_ the Red Lion; she just got someone to intercept what Lance's streaming into the Blue Lion while he's on patrol around Mars. If anyone finds us, they'll buy it."

His fingertips are drifting down in a felt constellation. Shiro crushes down the glassy horror of Lance's choice in lion-bonding material for later, later; his fingers wrap warm around Keith's wrist—tugs it up, presses his mouth to a pulse-point running in volts.

It's all the incentive Keith needs. His grip knuckles against a hip as Shiro leans down. The rest of the hall blurs through their wracking, clumsy steps, a hushed velvet montage beneath kisses gone frantic. He slams up against the steely double-doors, rattling buttons, groaning as Keith presses a thigh against him—spares just enough thought to admire the way their bodies crowd out the sight of the datapad as a little bot attaches to the base. "Somehow," Shiro pants, above the thin song of keys flaring white-green-white, "I'm pretty sure they're _not_ going to buy that we can unlock doors by kissing our way through."

"So," Keith says, "we just won't let them find us."

The locklight clicks, blinks out; the elevator's steel grinds apart. The compartment's round, cramped, silvery, faceted with fluorescent panes and a railing. Through the faraway door wafts smoke and laughter and song— but Keith's looking nowhere else: fingers biting hard on his shoulders, driving him back until the heel of his hands slam into metal, flesh and steel ringing. " _Keith_."

"Just this once," Keith says, "right?"

"Are you sure this is a good idea?"

"Nothing about you's a good idea," Keith says, and drops to his knees.

Hands batter and tangle as two go for his belt—Keith wins the match when he knocks his forehead into Shiro's ribs, _bites_ his hip through the rucked-up folds. His buttons strip open, one after another; the zipper gleams and comes undone. He's barely hard, cock a shadow's curve against the line of his boxers—but Keith's hand answers that, plucking and yanking at his waistband, wrapping hot around him in a slow stroke, intent. The first pull tenses just by degrees, skin whispering into friction. Shiro shifts against the wall, and then the rest stops mattering as Keith mouths over his cock.

" _Keith_ ," he says—but Keith's already sliding up, licking over the jump of a thicker vein, its tender pulse, swallowing in thick, urgent movements. No real surprise that he's sloppy, graceless about it, that he's nearly choking into each push, rough enough to leave him blinking in quick, watering beats. But he's devastating on his knees, lashes stitching, bruising fingerpoints into Shiro's thigh, still buttoned-up in his formal jacket as his throat flexes tight on the brink of _too much_. It takes a visceral, physical effort not to curve his palm against Keith's nape, tug his hair to draw him back, _easy, easy_ —and a gutted breath goes spilling out of him when Keith sinks back on his own, working the wider flare of the head with wet, lavishing focus. 

He's a mess, a wreck who could _lose_ it just to the sight of Keith's furious, gritty focus trained on him alone, panting fever and filthy sounds into the alcove's air, meters out of some alien ritual, half-unbuttoned and wholly undone—and Keith's not helping: his hand cinching hot and just careful enough, smoothing up the slicked line of his cock as his lips purse against the crest of a bared hipbone, every breath pounding hot enough to feel.

"Told you," he says, hoarse. "I want this to count."

An answer hooks deep in Shiro's lungs—dries out to sand and crumbles on his tongue as Keith tightens his fist, as his mouth trails down, down, lips smearing skin in a warm, deliberate slide to the dusty hairs around the base. His hand's still working, one pump after another, as he mouths at his balls, one and the other, intimate and obscenely intent, sucking at each until Shiro's whole frame's clenching with the throb of rhythm, with fingertips rubbing steady against the head of his cock.

It's _slow_ , though his veins are thrumming with it, heat twisting in the pit of his stomach as his palm grinds into steel—slower than he'd thought Keith would ever go; and still he doesn't stop, indulgent and rough and too eager, his fingers locking and shivering against Shiro's hip until Shiro presses a palm through his hair, tugging. 

_You don't have to force yourself._ He means to say it, shapes the thought whole—but Keith's eyes are flashing up to him, dazed and riled beneath the heavy lids. Deliberately, gaze fixed, he digs in harder, fingerpoints sinking fit to _bruise_ before he goes mouthing his way up the line of Shiro's cock, pushing back down in a thick swallow—and it's all that Shiro can do to hold on, fisting to the roots of his hair as Keith's mouth closes around him again, throat straining as it opens up, little by little, to take him deeper.

It doesn't last.

It's easy to feel it dawning: limbs stringing taut, gauzy heat welling up his spine, and at once Shiro's dragging at his hair, a stinging hard jolt—but Keith's never known grace, never bothered to learn, keeps his lips wrapped around Shiro's cock in a relentless greedy tilt as a fist wrings against his skull and pulse after striping pulse wracks through him.

The rest's a mess—staggering back against the elevator railing on a parched, guttering pant; Keith's brows ticking, clouding as he drops back to the floor, scruffs his hair as he scrubs a wrist over his swollen lips. _The universal consequence of getting blown in an elevator_ —but he regrets the thought as soon as it takes shape, as Keith looks up and their eyes catch.

He knows that look: that disheveled, laser-dense intent; the mouth just short of firming, all of Keith's shields pried from his reach; his gaze as clear as it'd ever been through their crackling holoscreens, across the castle's pale bridge, under a ceaseless frenzy of constellations when he'd torn his driving focus from the desert night and grinned at Shiro with eyes brimming full of stars. He knows: moments like these don't come out of nothing, without strings or grief or history.

He should know better than this.

"Hey," Shiro says aloud, and it's shaky, rusted, prickling already with guilt. "You think you can come up here?"

 _Later, later._ He presses the knowledge down.  


# *

  
"So you failed," the priest says.

She's kept her back to them for as much of the day's visit as she's been able to manage—enough to wonder if she thinks the pose is a game or a subtlety. Her fingertips brush the windowpane, stippling clear splotches across the frosted glass. The ridges of her spine gleam with the fuming daylight, each rough as a tiny wing. Her wardrobe's unraveled since coming to Xindi: backless dresses dark as forest shadows, their hems riddled with stars; off-the-shoulder swoops which ebb into cloudy chiffon sleeves; dresses with necklines that plunge like a hangman's rope. His every scar itches to look at all that skin glittering beneath the winter light; Shiro rolls his shoulder against the impulse to shrug off his jacket, to press it onto her wing-thin frame.

" _You_ ," Keith says in distaste. He folds his arms as he hitches back against a pillar. "You didn't even tell us what the mandate looked like."

"Oh, regret," the priest says. She clasps a hand over each heart. "My day's regret, my year's, my _life_ 's. Are you not heroes of legend? Did Zarkon break himself on an asteroid and bare his neck to Voltron's sword? The mandate is the oracle's greatest secret. I told you what I required. It's up to you to find the way, and it's your failure if you can't manage it."

"At least we _bothered_ with trying anything. I didn't even see you there."

"My banishment," the priest tells her reflection, "has lasted now for a hundred years. My return is not without condition or suspicion. There are even some who'd lay the blame of outsiders breaking into our world at my feet, and call it my error, my fault."

"Uh," Keith says. "It was."

" _All_ the more reason to take care with my appearances. Hearts from the highest floors of the ministry down to its roots are willing to believe the worst of me—to call me the first wave of a resistance. Exactly where do you propose that I could go without eyes following?"

"So you're just going to use us to do your dirty work."

Over a bare silvery shoulder, the priest laughs at his clear-eyed fury. "I thought you had experience in being heroes."

 _Heroes._ The priest knows her propaganda.

She knows other things, too, some more useful than others. Over days of quiet, idling visits— _you're my guests, my burden; if I didn't behave as if I could use you, my enemies would make up their own stories about my needs_ —she's taught them to play rrhug, a local board game. In her smoky, riddling voice, she's recited useful history over the tiles: how the mandate binds the oracles, but how the oracles too bound the mandate with its own protections. At each of Xindi's six theatres, there stands an altar. Only those who have visited each and taken the altar's blessing can touch the mandate without fear. The paladins are to tell the truth, as far as truth goes: they've descended as diplomats to ask for Rhoen's re-entry into the galactic alliance, now that the Empire's shattered to rubble. As alien representatives, they'll be under Paklar's protection while they visit; her own position is precarious enough that Xindi will trust her to keep an eye on their every deed.

They could leave her, of course, leave Rhoen to its shields and dust—but that's no real choice.

At the worktable, Shiro rises; he looks over as Keith's eyes flick to him, an unspoken signal.

"Never fear, paladin," the priest says as Keith's roiling temper settles. "My idleness serves you, too. I go to the theatres; I read the fortunes of my fateful faithful better than any machine has before me, and they strike out from my reading with certainty beating beneath their ribs where doubt once gnawed at their bones. My good behavior will stand as your decoy; and should _your_ efforts at subtlety fail, well. You wear masks. I've attendants of your height and size standing ready to play your parts in touring the city while you play mine." She smiles, all teeth. "Now, don't you have my dirty work to get to?"

They get to it.

Out they go: to the shining boardwalks and down through the square, dazzling in its eternal frost, to the theatre's prize stretched at its heart. The altar's a simple thing: a long platform polished to a glow like a sundial's, a bronzed basin resting on its pedestal. Deep in its glimmering, warm pool, the bottom looks well-worn where a thousand-thousand hands have dipped, rested their knuckles in reverence.

Keith rolls his eyes skyward, but he jams a fist against the bronze. Shiro doesn't ask what his messages to heaven entail.

Soon enough, the altar's light goes out. They leave without looking to see it tide back.

Day by day, they study their way through the local tastes and traditions and tripwires. _Alien_ 's a hard title to cast off without some way to melt into the scene. People stare at first, clump onto opposite sides of the streets, whispering; courtiers avert their eyes when Keith seizes his hand to tug him forward, when Shiro leans an elbow over Keith's shoulder, murmuring in the gilded dining chamber. In early mornings, attendants bustle up to their doors, offer fresh masks to mould over their brows and cheeks and mouths: masks with regal noses and slitted, arching brows; slavering masks painted red and grinning; glittering things whose hologram edges wisp and flicker with feathers and scales at whim, jeweled and intricate, at odds with the city's sweeping winter. A few servers can even be persuaded to linger while Keith glowers at all their selections, to smile and to gossip.

The Rhoenese are telekinetic, Shiro learns. It fits: winter fosters a certain defiant life. The city streets are full of sailing textbooks and fruit; its citizens carry no purses, but are trailed by a swarm of necessities; three bridges lie crumbling, half-finished, where fated aesthetic dictates that they look better broken. 

A consequence of a society born to innate telekinesis: touch is a sacrement, a sacrilege.

Shiro hasn't been a child for a long time; he knows the duties and taboos of a good guest. But this tradition takes him sidelong: a revelation at first, and then itch, instinct, impulse. They'd never been much for touching at the Garrison, or through the war: just a palm warm against his spine when he leaned down to trace sense into a faded diagram, a clap on his back in a daystruck hall, forehead pressed into his shoulder and knuckles anchored against his nape before a long mission. Now, though, every touch is a stolen thing, nudges and brushing fingertips rare and dazzling as opal. It's a constant, clouding thought. He takes them when he can, conscious of each gleaming theft. There's a thousand excuses: Keith's hair's grown obscene, swaying heavy over his eyes, begging for fingers to draw it back; at every dinner, crumbs stick at the corner of his lip; the way he hurries out on their early mornings, chafing his bare hands, fretful as any ordinary boy raised in balmy winters and blistering sand.

Each time, Shiro clenches his fists, metal and bone. He walks on.

Together they go wandering through the mazy city, clumsy and meandering as the very worst tourists. It'll be easier, after all, to stake an alibi on touring later if they build a record of it first. In a shop with faceted windows, Keith pokes at a silk-screened lantern, tells him about a city on a green-ringed planet where they carry something similar for luck. "They're really—weird about it," he adds, with the pinched frown that Keith reserves for mysteries that aren't useful. "The lamps're supposed to be lucky, but you only get them at funerals. There's even an organisation for keeping track of people that have one—if you hold onto one for too long, it's supposed to make you dream about the people you lost."

Shiro trades back a few careful anecdotes of his own. How Poltok, at war with the rest of the universe since before the Alteans took flight, negotiated its first-ever treaty under the Black Lion's stern eye. The rites of the Epgnel, settled in a mission that took him through their cobbled red streets, helmet sealed against the planet's endless sulfur clouds. The planet Cenar, where its bureaucrats had scrubbed the world's true name from every record as soon as it achieved planet-wide peace; rumors murmur that it's a long-strung word, accented and strange, which needs compound eyes as well as a muscular hydrostat to pronounce properly. Local legend goes that, so long as nobody betrays its true name to an outsider, Cenar will never fall to conquest; and they were cut and freed from the Galra on the brink of surrender, so who can really say if they were wrong? 

Distance makes them cartographers, confessors and fortune-seekers; story by story, they map their way back through the chasm of a lost year in tiny shops and sidestreets, restaurant-stalls where they eat at the counter with their masks clapped over their eyes. In the street, dusk's softened the surrounding snowdrifts to featherdown and flecks of crystal; only Keith's wrinkling nose betrays the cold. "You've still got a crumb," Shiro says, amused—and because they're in a subdued little alley, backs turned from the evening crowd, he leans forward like an old habit, flicks it onto a fingertip. 

It isn't a signal. It doesn't mean anything—but it's too late to say that. Keith's eyes strike alight, sharp and startled beneath new velvet, and then he's stepping forward, palm leashing his nape to pull Shiro down.

"You don't have to," he says—but that's later, long after, a promise lacing warm on the tip of Shiro's tongue. He has to stop to remember what that means—licks his lips, tasting salt, spine prickling with new frost.

"We—" Shiro says, but that's the wrong start; the word's hollow in his ears, meaningless against even the ashes of a kiss. "This can't happen again."

But he's smoothing up Keith's shoulder as he says it, thumbing the lampstruck slope of his neck. "Just once," Keith says, barely pitched above the night, and Shiro's already pulling him into the closest corner, kissing him like it'll bury the echo pounding beneath the words, the recklessness that's always meant _anything you want_ , a promise long and always broken.  


# *

  
He means to be good.

 _Kind intentions_ , he knows, but force of will's never failed him before. Intent, as it turns out, is a different beast: an eager thing that'll twist and claw up memories out of nothing. The dip of Keith's lashes with a rare, summer-dry laugh; Keith's back settling warm against his; Keith's mouth and the way it parted for his cock, the slow, eager stretch of his lips as shadows hollowed along his cheeks, shifting with each urgent swallow to take him deeper, deeper—

Fingertips jump like sparks—grinding into his shoulder to sling him down against the tiles.

In the dust, Shiro sprawls back, blinks his way out of the daze with a tuneless rush singing through his ears. A silhouette leans over him, boots bracketing his foot. The ballroom rafters shiver past his head, daylight dripping through the milky watercolors. 

"I don't think you're really _trying_ ," Keith says. It comes out cocky, mouth skewing into a half-smile.

Shiro considers this. Then he kicks Keith off his feet.

He holds back. The alternative's never been a real choice—and still the match sails into a wreck, all their shows and brutal tricks laid bare across a requisitioned ballroom's floor. Keith's a brat and a filthy brawler, possibly has been since birth. He grew into muscle and a longer reach too late to school himself into a habit of relying on physical advantages; he's battled hand-to-hand on planets with slumping gravity; he's learned to chase endurance instead of impulse. Shiro's kept the edge when it comes to strategy and physical reach, but Keith likes to _win_. The result's no surprise: an elbow-to-gut, kneecap-kicking kind of fight, pacing in circles, toppling and lunging by turns, no surrender before the victor's satisfied. And so: Shiro slams in one punch after another as Keith twists, flips, and drives in beneath his next swing, quick as a jack-knife springing; Keith rushes him only to spring and nail a heel into his ribs; Shiro braces over him and Keith hooks legs around his waist as his hands chain over Shiro's neck—and his face's flushing hot before the position hits, instants before he's dragging a knee along the floor to crush Keith back against it. 

The rest's inevitable.

Body answers body in a lash of felt lightning. Keith _arches_ against him, a solid line of heat, takes advantage of Shiro's rigid shock to pin him back onto the tiles; he straddles Shiro's hips, palming over the buzz grown long and loose. A kiss ignites from nothing; his mouth opens to it at once, tracing each breath to its root as he clasps a hip, fingers rubbing beneath the untucked white shirt—

Shiro breaks first. He twists away with his pulse roaring hoarse in his ears, _bewildered_ and _hungry_ ringing double-echoes beneath every heartbeat. A hand's pressed to Keith's chest, suspending distance between them, a fleeting reprieve. Through the thin cloth, he can feel the matched pounding.

"We can't do this here," he says.

They tumble their way back to Keith's suite, long corridors boiled into a mist of walls and pearled lights and alien muttering. It doesn't matter: Keith's crushing him back against the door as he fumbles for the palmprint; Keith with his hair gone salt-filthy and knuckles grinding his jaw, his breaths strung into a loop of stunned, unthinking sounds. Call it a miracle that nobody stops them before the lock sings open and they stumble in through the antechamber, plunging together into the fine synthfurs laid over the mattress's black stretch. 

Keith's temper shortens in bed. His fingertips scratch and scrape into his own shirt, scrabbling up the hem, splitting buttons to push it off his shoulders, and he's breathy and disgruntled when Shiro presses a kiss into the crook beneath his ear, trails from his throat to his collarbone, mouthing his way down to a glassy hipbone.

"Hurry _up_ ," he breathes, two words bitten into a sound fit for ten curses. In answer, Shiro slows again—he spends a minute sucking bruisy-red marks around his navel, flicking his tongue into the little dip, until Keith manages to catch him in the ribs with a heel. Backwards he thuds with a grunt, and Keith spares him one merciful beat for recovery before he's pinning Shiro's shoulder into the furs, settling back on top.

They wrestle. There's no plan and the lack of it saturates everything—no safeties, no stages, no end to their descent. Keith hauls him up by the collar and Shiro rolls them over, ignoring the grumbling to press his lips to an ear, a temple, the wiry dark roots of his hair. Sacrament and sacrilege—and yeah, he can see it. There's a ravenous symmetry to the way Keith reacts: how touch after touch shocks through his whole frame every time, locking him from jaw to heels like he's been punched, like he won't be clawing and grinding back in instants for worse. Shiro smoothes from ribs to hip, a soothing absent line; his knee presses between Keith's thighs, conscious of the way they part for him, yielding and yielding, the ghosting shiver that winds his body tight again as Shiro's mouth works at a nipple. Keith's shuddering, visceral and marrow-deep, grip gone urgent against his shoulder—and still he takes his time, nuzzling and dragging teeth over every inch: the shallows of his throat, a clavicle's bird-fine jut, the downy glint that skims his chest here and there.

But impatience makes a risky fuel to burn. One more kiss and Keith's knocking him over again, swinging a leg over him to lock thighs over his hips. "No," he says, rough, and rocks down just a little, flashing adrenaline through every vein as Shiro cants up from the bed. "Stay _down_ there." 

Breath after breath strips off his tongue into a branding heat. Under Keith's brutal hands, the shirt's stripped off of him—he tenses as a hand runs over skin, mapping scars. "Hey," he says, and their eyes catch. "We've got all the time we need right now. You can take it—"

"Easy?" Keith says, and doesn't look away. "I'm pretty sure you can keep up."

It's the same fierce-eyed look that's caught him time and again, ramparts abandoned and watchtowers burning, the radiance of a boy who's never learned any better than an undivided bruising trust. _You can't_ curls his tongue, boils thick as lead in his lungs—but Keith wouldn't understand; he never has before.

"Whatever you want," Shiro says. 

It nets him another kiss, all impact and demand as his palms shiver down Shiro's chest in greedy, helpless possession. The nightstand's a lunge and a long lean away—it's a new miracle that Keith manages to seize the old microbotic salve, to unscrew it with barely a beat's disconnect between thighs and hips. Shiro snags and rights the jar as it goes tumbling over the bed; Keith's already hitching his weight onto his knees, fingers rubbing slick and gleaming before he fumbles to push them into himself. It takes a few tries, slow thrusts as his brows skew and snap and a bite dents his lip, dissatisfied. 

"Here," Shiro says in the end—nearly doesn't recognise his own husky, gutted voice. Impatience is a disease whose best prognosis is fatal, and if there's any proof of that, it's here, now, thrumming with the felt impossibility of _waiting_ for an answer before his fingers wind over Keith's wrist. His metal hand splays over the base of Keith's spine, tempering a faint felt squirm against the cooler steel before it sinks to spread him open. Instinct more than actual practice aligns them; his grip grates the jut of a wrist's tendon as Keith works himself back into it, as his head tips up.

It's a tensing drawn-out wait, stroking the new stiffness from his back as Keith crooks a finger, pushing harder, stretches with the next into a rougher thrust. Under the shivering silence, Shiro tilts his wrist a little, guiding, and _feels_ the impact: the way Keith's head drops at once, the breath that hooks between them, sunken eyelids and a name run to fever on his flushed mouth. 

Hard to remember that this moment won't last—that the open, absolute surrender isn't his to claim, to coax out again and again, to hold onto.

 _Nothing about you's a good idea_.

"Better?" he whispers.

By now, no question's the right one—Keith's brows flicker between shudder and scowl. He shuffles forward in something that starts like a kneeling stride and comes out just short of a waddle; it should be funny, but mostly works out to be devastating as his fingers twist and his thighs clench along Shiro's ribs, as his weight sinks over Shiro's cock, worse with every slight _rock_ , working his way down. "I've _got_ this. Just—" he grits, "let me handle it."

He should help, he wants to—but want's blurring under friction, abstract and dim against the legs caging him in and Keith's cock skimming fever-bright skin. Shiro palms up its thrusting line in one stroke, smearing its beading before his fist curls over the head, tightens against the vibration of a felt, hitching pant. "You'll have to tell me how you want it."

"Something—" but the word prickles in Keith's throat, evaporates. He swallows, once and again, against the wracking weight of Shiro working him over like they've hours and days to spend—he's dazed, and distraction makes him obscene, trembling in those thoughtless, indulgent gaps where he can't rein in the next shudder, where his whole frame quakes and he _fucks_ into Shiro's grip. "Something I'm gonna remember—and _keep_ remembering when I wake up. When we walk out of here." It tumbles into a hush like a confession, shaking and brutal. "I want to keep feeling you for days."

The rest sweeps by in a tumult: stippling fingerprints into Keith's thigh, the back of his hip; stroke after grinding stroke until Keith's gasping for it, guttering little groans with his cock jerking hot where Shiro's wrapped his fingers around him. It's a start-stop sequence, sparking fury and clumsy frustration, and he slows for just long enough to let Keith stoop and angle as he stretches himself open. More salve. A hand brackets one hipbone for grounding, and he waits until Keith's sinking with it, arching as his thighs stutter through the harder angle before he gets going again, fingers cinching with every pull, tightening over the inky veins and the flushed head as Keith takes him down to the hilt. His grip flexes, but he lets Keith set the pace: knees furrowing the furs as he feels out the right angle to tilt his weight, to grind down until his lashes wring together—rolling into slight, eager pushes until his thighs can carry the rhythm of each thrust. Still Shiro keeps himself in check: careful movements, just enough to feel the way Keith clenches and shifts against his pulse, how all that felt tension's melting down to trembling static with every hit to the knob of his spine.

He goes slow, slow until a knee locks and grinds against his ribs; Keith's fingers knot over his wrists, dragging them loose to pin one above each shoulder.

"Come _on_ ," Keith bites out, but it's no real demand. He's gasping already, flushed beneath his fringing hair, breaths pushing out in short, hot spills. Shiro braces a heel, anchoring himself to _grind_ into the next thrust. Stars blaze and whirl through the backs of his eyes, aching with friction, Keith's lean weight pinning him down. Restraint's getting harder to remember: Keith grinds against him and Shiro snaps his hips into it, need shorting out the impact of regret gone dry at the back of his throat. He's still thinking, and thinking too far. Here and now there's only Keith: his selfish, snarling fury; grinding the heels of his hands into Shiro's wrists, silver and flesh, to keep him down; licking into the dark heat of his mouth with starving desperation as he rocks them to a building, agonising rhythm. Keith with all that soldier's ruthlessness cored out of him, thrust by thrust, focused and dark-eyed with need, looking at Shiro like there's nothing else in the world.

The rest of their day tumbles into shadow.  


# *

  
Over weeks, they make rites of their own.

By day, they trace Xindi's mazy, winter-wrapped streets to theatre after theatre. The footpaths and balconies overflow with congregations, faithfuls lingering to see their priests. These scatter coins and ribbons and cut blossoms to shiver in the warm, refracting waters of the altar-basins, and leave their other offerings to shadow and frost. It's getting easier to climb onto the thin dais, press their hands to the very base, wait until light flows out of the metal; fewer people look at them at all. At night, they borrow the room's laser projector and fire old star-maps across the white ceiling, collected before Rhoen had fallen from its place in orbit. Shiro's spent months in the sector, knows the local constellations from a few angles; Keith's visited a system only one light-year away. There are planets, they tell each other, where the people believe that the universe is a body in its own right: that the lives hurtling and streaming across the land are as ribosomes and mitochondria to a eukarote. Planets ringed with asteroid pieces and broken shuttles lured by false signals from a star-mad species incapable of space travel. Planets where the locals evolved into fifteen photoreceptors and dress only in shades of red indistinguishable to the human eye.

There are other worlds, too.

Space unravels time. One year on Earth ribbons out to the same length on every continent, slow or quick or endless; but days blur when they're measured by expeditions and repairs to the hull and screens of a robotic lion. Shiro knows better than to count their distance in hours.

He goes instead by the differences. In a year, Keith's grown into a slender, final geometry: arms corded, his back stippling with muscle but the same fuming tension that he'd carried at nineteen. He hasn't gotten used to constant spontaneous touch, but he's learned to yield anyway: through their dreamy afterglows, he rests a hand over the bend in Shiro's arm, endures a body tucking itself against the curve of his back. He's scarring, too—silver's laced his left forearm, pocked the edge of his jaw, split his nape with a jagged shimmer. Shiro learns the moments to trace between his shadowy veins; in the stillness, he measures a thin crease down Keith's back, cartography by touch. "This must've hurt."

The dark smudges Keith's grimace, but not the way it skews his voice, the tendon's tic beneath Shiro's fingertips. A year and all the old, brilliant promise of the Garrison flyboy's burned down to the wire: a gaunt jaw, eyes caught dark. In the aftermath, lamplight dusts vertebrae and glosses the turn of his shoulder; his hair's all plastering tufts, strands inked wet along his nape. "Tauzoid knife. That was—almost a year ago. I thought they were trying to take the Red Lion apart. No one could get me to listen." He hunches against the memory. "They had to bring me down."

"Pidge used to tell you that you never watched your back when you got into a fight," Shiro says, trying to make light of it. He pulls away to fetch tea from a silvery ceremonial pourer, sits on the bed's edge to watch shadows feather and furl down the hollow valley of his spine. "Thought you'd have learned by now."

"It's hard to think about watching your back when you've got people always looking out for it. I'm getting better at it these days."

 _Better_. The clearing lit with two moons and an alien's white shadow. A bayard's red-edged reeling; a fallen guard's breaths clumping wet in the soil. A wildfire, he remembers, on the brink of flaring out.

He doesn't answer, and hears the click of Keith's thoughts through the dark.

"It was just one time, Shiro," he says, husky on exhaust and half-dreaming. He could be telling it to the windowpane or the rising night. "I was stupid. I took off my helmet on a battlefield before Pidge confirmed the atmosphere was clear. The other side gassed us with some kind of hallucinogen. Somehow, it damaged my link to the Red Lion. I couldn't feel her at all, and it made me crazy. I took apart half the clearing just trying to _find_ her, find anyone I knew. Kolivan got to me first, but I didn't listen. I couldn't. I looked at our allies, at Lance and Hunk and Pidge—and even the princess, and I thought that they had to be fakes. Because if they were the real thing—"

"What?"

One fist knots in the sheets. "I couldn't think straight," Keith says at last, too quiet. "I knew you were gone—long gone. No one could've called you back. But I just kept saying—if they were really Voltron, you'd be with them. You'd have come back for me."  


# *

  
Dusks and dawns whirl by in handfuls. They learn to take the nights for themselves; it's easier than turning from the flinches and shudders of passing masks when they reach for each other on the street. Keith's suite, too, is the right space for a secret: its walls glow through the night, its ceiling a sloping canvas wide enough to capture a galaxy's worth of constellations. From time to time, they sprawl and review briefs and news from the acolytes; the hush blurs the hours, leaves conversations to wander in and out from their slack and easy quiet. Keith picks his way through maps, records, collected reports while Shiro ties his hair back in its sleeping knot.

Head still tipped back, Keith says, "Do you still have those dreams?"

Dreams where he's pried open, ribcage flayed bare to the delight of a livid eye. Dreams of only hands probing him: dark-furred fingers burrowing into his shoulders and elbows and wrists, cinching straps over limbs and throat to lock him against steel unseen. Dreams of needle after needle sinking into a body whose nerves and tendons won't answer to him: a needle sliding into his hip, his lungs, an unstirring arm, rolling and bruising veins beneath the skin before it pierces, a needle closing in to a retina as fingers pry the lids open, holding him fast to watch. Dreams where he wakes with his fingers dripping red before the lamplight banishes the stains—nails reeking rust and iron on his tongue, crowded with skin-memories of tissue and muscle squelching and parting in wet, meaty strands blue-veined-red. Dreams where he wakes and wakes, and scuttles from his bed to walk down an abandoned grey hall, grinning his gold-eyed malice into a string of cracking pods stuffed with bodies past saving. 

On other planets, he'd asked for a double-barred door and keyed every lock to red. He programmed suite settings until even their tamest whispering fans died away. Only in the muting of deep space, lulled by the Black Lion's hum, did he sleep undreaming.

"Sometimes," Shiro says. He's learned to do better; that's enough.

"Back on the ship," Keith says, pulling his question out of their shared pool of silence. He leans away as Shiro's fingertips brush the base of his skull; with a rueful quirk, Shiro lets him go. Hair curtains and frays over one shoulder as Keith pulls back to the bed's edge to seize the tea-pourer. There he stops, grimaces at its swooping horn before he tilts it over a cup. Steam billows up; the scent of mint polishes the night air. Shiro can _hear_ his frown, the sullen souring of a boy whose veins sing and cry for caffeine. "Once in a while, I'd hear the elevator run in the middle of the night. Going up. I went up after you a few times."

"I thought you got over your light sleeping when you were eighteen."

"It came back," Keith says. He sets the pourer down but doesn't sprawl again. "I worked through it. Whenever I couldn't sleep, though, I'd always—hit the training deck. Take the gladiator simulations until I got tired."

Shiro leans on his hands. He studies Keith's back: the muscle that rolls beneath his shoulderblades, the slender valley of his spine. A fever sweeps him, from the whites of his nails to his core; it snags in his throat, tightening his skin as if with a key's twist, then evaporates. He says, "Running's—easier on me. It's better now—but for the time, that was what I needed. There's a circuit at the top of the castle that'll open up to a clear ceiling. You can look up and see nothing but stars."

 _Step. Step. Step_. Long strides pounding until his pulse steadied with them. Counting worlds above, spinning imaginary constellations from star to star. After fifteen laps, he'd stop on the track to gape at the gentle silvery spirals of galaxies overhead. Weightless and blank, just an ache and a hollow mirror for the universe to fill.

"I used to wonder sometimes," Keith says. "If you ever got sick of it. Flying. Space. The stars."

Listen close, Shiro imagines, and he could still hear the mischord underneath: the space where the question would have been once unimaginable between two Garrison boys mapping the turning ceaseless universe. Memory inks through the backs of his eyelids: Keith's broad-knuckled fingers tracing spirals through a galaxy; Keith's half-smile like a sidelong secret, peppering him with idle questions about popular theories of how distance from a star affected atmosphere. _Aren't you supposed to_ pass _your astrometry eval to get into space?_ Shiro's lashes sink; he puts up a warding hand. "I'm only half-sick of shadows," he says.

"Half-sick of _what_ ," Keith says, so displeased by this derailing nonsense that Shiro's struck helpless at once, leaning across the bed to him, smiling, tugging at the pendulum of a stray lock. Keith's brows _snap_ together—but he takes the signal and twists in place, grumbling obedience. His squared shoulders ease as Shiro sweeps his hair into one hand again, starts explaining Tennyson as taught to transfer students racing through high school literature.

"You don't even _like_ poetry," Keith mutters.

He doesn't. But it's the act of remembering that he likes: simple as asking and receiving, line by lettered line, never more than he can take.

Keith crashes first, the way he always has: exhaustion settling onto him in deep, forgetting drifts. Shiro waits until his bowstring breaths ease, until his mouth slackens to a mute, dissatisfied line, rounding the grey bend of exhaust into sleep—and then just a while longer, feeling out the way their exhales unspool in tandem, holding the night aloft. In the dark, he leans over, presses two fingers down his cheekbone, the stroke of his brutal jaw, feeling the way Keith turns up to the touch. 

But the automated lamps are winking out, light by light. He has to rise in the end, to palm the autolock behind him, to leave the rest for dreaming. 

He drew their new lines; it serves no one if he doesn't stand behind them.  


# *

  
"Verified. Fake. Fake. Verified. Porn."

"Porn," Keith says. He snakes another look at the offending page, tilts an ear down to the translator. The little bot shrills, chasing through each line; in a split-pained-second, Keith's reddened up to his ears and snapped it over.

The deadline's closing in. Xindi's thriving with priestly rites as the ritual period runs on; queues snake for blocks along the boulevards outside the fatereading theatres. Paklar answers all of her audiences' appetites to the letter; she's a gaudy, sugarspun presence in the market square, between the spiraling bell-towers where the altars stand shining. These days, she blazes by their rooms only for long enough to sift through the latest reports and diagrams passed along by her acolytes: rumors of the mandate's weight, its origins, what it's done to the intruders who've come before.

Now she laughs in her usual honeyed peals. The priest's sprawled onto the coziest armchair in their sitting room, kicked one leg over the back and left an ankle to dangle. The skirts bunch in frills over her thighs; her pipesmoke blossoms up through the air, all lush and choking petals. "What an old-fashioned boy you are for someone so intent on stirring up our faithfuls. Do you know you've distressed half the city?"

From their worst sofa—a bouncy tasseled thing overflowing with slippery round cushions, which refuses to yield even to the stubbornest of elbows—Shiro lifts his head. But Keith, by now, knows enough not to rise to the bait. "Just half?" he says.

Beneath her pale half-mask, the priest curls a smoke-polished lip. "Oh, to be so careless as a boy from the backend of the universe." She snaps her fingers, steel sparking. "Very well: a lesson in rudimentary ontology. I raise a ceramic design and it pours for me. I crush a dustbeetle and it's only dust. A digiscrawl takes its meaning from the touch of my eyes; without a reader, it is at most pixelation and polarised glass. I place my hand into an altar, that I might receive its blessing and carry it forward to reshape my own fate. We touch things to define or unmake them. There are no alternatives."

"If you've got a point, just spit it out. We haven't even looked at half the stack yet."

"It's tiring work," the priest says, with a scarring, tragic moue. "You only had to collect it. I'm the one who has to _listen_ to it all, sort its usefulness."

"If you're having problems," Shiro says, crooking an arm over a cushion and ignoring its subdued attempts to slide him off. "I'd be happy to summarise the reports for you. It'd save time."

Even cloudy and fresh from her last rites of the day, the priest's not without her own temper; she scowls at him over the loungechair's plush arm.

"Defining, unmaking," she says, in the fluting voice that carries over theatre rows and beckons her supplicants back into reading after reading. "Think, boy. Aren't those the best powers of any god? Whole sentient species have groveled together for lesser miracles than a scrap of creative destruction. _Rend and ruin my enemies. Make me greater than the worm I am. Tell me what I'm for._ And yet. Here you are, spending your quota for miracles like it's meltwater. You go out and you make a show of yourself. You aren't touching him without purpose. You reach for him like a promise to yourself, hoping that he's still within reach. You clasp his hand like an echo of a year long gone. You've seen war; you know that steel makes a better chain than any flesh-and-bone thing. And still you hold onto him through our thin crowds, as if the touch could remake who he is at the core, a soldier who'll turn his back on you time and again—"

" _Paklar_ ," Shiro says, and the priest's mouth drops against the couch at once. 

A page's crackling between Keith's fingers. In the trailing silence, he sets it down, anchors his knuckles along the table. "You wanted us to find the mandate by the last ritual," he says. "Now'd be a good time to tell us about your backup plan."

"Heroes," the priest says, flicking the word like a cherry pit. She says it again, louder, a froth of syllables that overrides the electric-spitting translation in a singing tide. "Does that translate so clumsily in other systems? Have I given my mercy away to children who'll only waste it?"

"Everyone's capable of failure," Shiro says, mild. "Even the paladins of Voltron have limits."

The priest's laughter hangs in the air, lush with smoke. "Oh, youth," she drawls in her indulgent way, but her dark eyes carry frost beneath the velvet. "There is no failure on Rhoen, paladin. There is only fate and the exact action needed to counter it. I may not be an _oracle_ , but I know their ways; for a century, I've done nothing but lay my pieces for this opportunity. You will not miss."

"Is that supposed to be some kind of prediction?" Keith demands. "You're talking a _lot_ for someone who couldn't make it to oracle herself."

The priest smiles, gnashing silver. "You're baiting most irrelevantly. I'll bite your heart out before I keep listening to nonsense. Let's put it differently—you may fail, or you may survive. Don't," she sighs to Keith's impending bark, "take it as a threat. I'm aware that your lions would wreck all of Rhoen in their rage ever-after. But between your touching and my fate—oh, I'll stake myself on those odds, ready enough. Find the next altar, paladins. That's all."

She stands, parts the curtains to the suite's antechamber, and billows out. Smoke twines through her wake, a metallic heat. In the quiet, Shiro sits up, and every pillow spills off the sofa at once. Bemused, he stands, dusts his knees off and sets every piece back in place. In the silence, he strides over to the strategy table to reach for the first sheaf of reports.

A little tremor shifts them. Keith's staring into the steel, grinding hands against the edge until the bones blare white.

He should know better; he does—but his palm's already wrapped over Keith's fist. The shudder flatlines like a cut circuit; Keith's eyes swing up to his, the kind of look that leaves no choice but to stare back. _Making, unmaking_. A pilot, a sword. One piece of five, set adrift in a race to the universe's end. Nothing that should fit his fingertips into the hollows between Keith's knuckles.

"There's—" The word collapses in Keith's throat; he reshapes it. "There's something she's not telling us."

His eyes hold as steady under artificial light as they'd ever been in some whitewashed regulation room. Shiro swallows. "There's always something they don't tell us," he says. He smoothes over Keith's knotted fingers, deliberate, then turns back to the unsorted pages. "People who call Voltron down expect a hero. When you're a hero, they think you can take anything." He stops, trailing back over the mazy diagrams. "It's not too late to pull out. Report back to the castle and figure out what's going on before we move forward."

"This ritual happens once a century. If we don't finish this now, we're not going to get the chance."

There's more to the words than trust. The priest hadn't made her offer until she'd watched Keith slaughter his way through a trained squadron. Under a bayard's edge, she'd turned her wrists up and smiled. _You'll notice that I didn't choose to sell myself—_ but Paklar's been nothing less than silvery practicality. No practical plan calls Voltron for a mere theft.

"Keith," he says.

"I _know_ ," Keith says. Contempt loads beneath the words, coarse as old ice. "We're only going to do whatever it takes _within reason_ , right?"

"It's all we can afford. There's still a lot of other people out there in the universe. People who need our help."

Some answers Keith takes harder than others—still, all their jagged new gaps leave their distances uncertain. His smile cracks: slight as a knife's point, a dare with no kindness at stake. " _Knowledge or death,_ Shiro," he says, history made lethal in his teeth. "She called us because she needed someone to save them. No matter what it took."

It's a mantra he knows, a line torn from other alien holy writ—but there's something about the priest in the way Keith says it: as if he's caging other words behind his teeth, too, stirring sugar and venom into the conversation to keep a secret at bay. 

She'd known they were coming. But she'd wanted to see what they were willing to do, too.

Shiro looks back, even-eyed. "We're in this together," he says; Keith turns his head first. "We'll just have to see how it goes."  


# *

  
_Find the next altar._ But a chase is easier said than plotted and done. Of the six theatres, a dozen centuries' worth of rumors have woven over the Theatre of the Lost. Whispers lure them out to Xindi's northernmost tower, which casts its needlepoint shadow across the city in a slow compass's tour. On the crest of another rumor, they ride the city's winding hyperloop out to a shabby gazebo, which teeters on spindling crystal legs over a cliff's plunge. No luck—but that's not unusual. Finding the Lost, supplicants murmur, is fate's mark, a great promise granted to few.

Across the mountain range, then. In deference to its defenses, Xindi disables all technology which won't carry passengers for seventy powdery klicks around, and its system of cave-mouths pinch too small for the lions to fit. They spend five days soaring across the snow in search of the abandoned entrance. On the sixth, Keith wakes to lamplight and Shiro tipping over his bedside, crowned with sleepy cowlicks but wide-eyed with triumph over a new map's broken encryption. 

As it turns out, the ceremonial pourers aren't mint tea at all.

At least the expedition's an excuse for Keith to wear his old clothes. One excuse is enough: red jacket, dark jeans, boots heavy enough to crush any velvet mask beneath his heel, the swaggering comfort of every teenage boy whose shoulders were born for one single outfit. In the afternoon, they follow the season-beaten trail inward to a new hunch. The opening's slim as a needle's eye and armored with ice, barely a fit for their shoulders and hips if they turn sideways. Keith stares at the crack in the wall, brows drawn and dead-eyed, and looks as if he's imagining a similar crack across Shiro's temple—but Shiro knows better. Two minutes' scraping excavation unearths glossy wall beneath the old snow, etched with interlocking sigils like the one drawn on the priest's cheek.

"It's _always_ a cave," Keith mutters as they ease inside. 

"If it makes you feel any better," Shiro says, dry from close behind him, "I'm pretty sure we're not about to find another lion in here."

The chamber runs warm: dim, dust-shot beams crisscrossing across a circling floor etched with rubble and age-greyed tiles. The first chamber looks nothing like the ruins which littered historical dramas and blockbusters on Earth: a boxy slate tunnel which twists around a corner and yawns into a bigger cube, and another, square little chambers opening one into the next like jewelry boxes swallowing each other whole. Its chalky floor drones with the same deep, charging resonance that'd coursed beneath the oracle's ministry, the faraway black wood below the mountains.

Keith keeps watch, bayard in hand; Shiro carries the spirit-lamp.

Their path drops into a gaping hole, its fringes littered with abandoned climbing gear: chains, braided makeshift vines, striped, moth-eaten loops of static rope. They tug at the vines before they slide down, one by one. The passages narrow, thin as tombs; shadows clasp and claw after their footsteps. Keith presses ahead as Shiro holds their light high, stopping only where the map needs more deciphering. A scrawl litters the margins: the uncooperative black splotching of a hand more used to coding and keying. The translator snarls through its mazy lines on loop, reading and revising before it leaps from the clumsy ink into the design. What he'd taken for scrollwork unwinds into sigils, lettering, one mark after another lashing into a gleaming point in the cave, inches ahead of Keith's blotting steps.

His head lifts; the map's symbols resolve into a rapidfire sequence: a pressure sensor, a razored edge. _Danger, traveler._ He thinks to shout, he means to, but his legs are staggering, tripping into a run, burning up the distance before his voice breaks surface. Keith's turning, shoulders slack, bayard looped in his fingers, as the wall yawns open, teeth gleaming white, white—

Shiro wakes to darkness. Gutted panting. Prison bars gnash through the black sweep of his eyelids; sourness wraps his throat, and his fist grinds rubble before—

He remembers: metal. Falling. Keith. 

The ground's broken earth, shifting beneath him. He makes to sit up but Keith seizes his arm. "Don't," he says.

"Keith," he says—grits it through the gravel and the dizzying spiral through the back of his skull. The lamplight's gone. Through the dark, the passageway reeks of heartwood ash and old cement, and something a little sweeter. "It's just a little dizziness. I'll be fine in a second—"

"I don't care. Just stay _down_."

Shadows strip him down to transparencies: a glare stark as glass, his familiar jaw drawn to viciousness. "Hey," Shiro says, wry and stirring. "I'm still here, all right?" He reaches up; his thumb brushes the corner of a cheek and Keith flinches.

"Yeah," he says. "For now."

The ruined hush's clouding over their heads. With some care, he pulls back, presses his wrist to the earth like a setting anchor. "It's not like you'll never see me again after this mission's finished," Shiro says. His mouth's crooking, but he can't get it to reach his eyes. "I should've guessed that you'd keep flying—even once everything was over."

" _The war_ 's over." Every word jars like biting steel. "That doesn't mean the fight is. But I guess you don't need to hear that from me."

 _Keith_. It stings in his teeth, an echo stretched thin over years, a plea that's no longer his to make. "For what it's worth," Shiro says aloud. "I'm sorry."

"Sorry for _what?_ "

Even through the dark, he knows that framing: the swordsteel spine, shoulders curving as if to a bowstring's edge, his snapping fists hilt-callused and ready to weaponise. Shiro looks at his patchy red jacket, the stitches worn and slackening over his heavy shoulders—he thinks of the desert, a wind-snapped collar, a rare and brilliant smile.

"I should've given you a real goodbye," he says instead. "I owed you that."

Breath after breath runs shallow. In the dark, there's only pressure: nails grinding bone, the mouldering reek of things melting back to soil and cinders, lungs and teeth tearing the air by strips. "You don't _owe_ me anything," Keith says, and the words fire out like buckshot. "You never did, Shiro. Telling me in a different way wouldn't have changed anything. You got into the Black Lion and you disappeared. _Coran_ had to tell me that you didn't want anyone to know where you were going."

"He was supposed to say that I was safe."

"Safe from the rest of us," Keith says, in piercing black-eyed temper.

 _But_. He hadn't meant to stay gone, not at first. While they'd scrounged for the final battle, scrambling to string the alliance's leftovers together after Lotor's immolation, Shiro had pored over reports from the galaxies which spun at the very edges of the conquered empire. Messages of impending retreat, signs that any regiments etched with the Galra insigna might be looting for their last stock-up—anything which could cut down Voltron's victory and shield the homeworld fleet from its final pyre. What he'd gotten instead were letters, holomessages, mission briefs saved one on top of the next, a ceaseless stream of desperation from casualties long broken out of the ugly luxury of pride, firing their prayers into the castle databanks as it lay dreaming under ten thousand years. There were planets which had been scoured of sentience, cleansed and kept for harvest, systems where the Galra had inculcated slavery like a religion, manufactured bow-backed children who would serve until their spines splintered from the work. They came with pleas and prayers, clipping pictures and final recordings. _Please, just hear us through. We ask only that someone remember that we once lived._ He'd torn out of the bridge to tell Coran that he was going to help them, help _someone_ —that he'd be back when they needed to form Voltron, when the outer sector emergencies died down. Under the Black Lion's racing shadow, the Sreminow shattered their chains, incinerated the factories, unearthed old books and elected a new representative to tattering cheers. He'd brokered an alliance for them with the neighboring system, secured their fledgling cities a new position in the local trade; and in their gratitude, Sreminow's new diplomat had given him another report. A nearby star system had been driven to mercenary work with the Galra invasion; they'd started marshaling forces for an attack on the closest galaxy.

 _I understand,_ the black paladin said, and he had. He'd transmitted his report to the castle, confirmed that the battle over Fuent could unwind without a show of force from Voltron, and flown on.

It hadn't occurred to him until later, safe in the shoals of faraway constellations, that he'd been running.

Harder to wind back through the timeline now, to face the dark and the body braced over his. He'd studied that face once: its drowsy glares, the way its brows would draw down in disgust or embarrassment, how his mouth curled over an engine's purr. But that boy's gone, burned up in the dark of a long year like a spirit into exorcism smoke. It's a stranger who's pressed up against him for nights on end, starved and longing, grown out of all the certainties that had once lashed them together. A warped double image, like a film reel scarred by a matchlight. 

He could reach out, trace the new articulation of cheek and jaw, memorize the pressure it takes to bruise those hard-drawn lips. He could learn the world over again.

His fingers curl and clench at one side. Soft and slow, Shiro says, "I know I meant something to you."

" _Everything._ "

A thin silence; color drains out with the word.

"You had to go home, Keith."

Another boy might have let the exhaust bleed through—but Keith's still close. His shoulders flex; what pours through the dark's only bewildered. "You _know_ me," he says, "Shiro."

"Right," Shiro says. "I do know you. I know that you've spent your whole life fighting. When you were a kid, you fought to figure out who you were. When you got to the Garrison, you had to fight every day to prove that they were right to keep you—that you had a place with everyone else in the unit. After you found me, and we formed Voltron, we fought the Galra Empire. I'm not saying that those weren't the right decisions. But we made those choices because the alternatives would've had consequences we couldn't face. All of that's over now, Keith. You don't have to be a soldier anymore."

"What does that _mean?_ "

"It means—" Shiro stares into stalactites, to the motes spinning adrift. He must have known once, must have carried some definition inside himself for milkshakes and onion rings striped with colorful sauces; dinners in a flaking booth; a broad, copper-jangling arm slung over his shoulder. In a pillared ring surrounded by full-throated bloodlust, he'd only shut his eyes and thought— "You used to want to fly through the farthest parts of space," he says. "Just to see how fast you could go. There's places on Earth you've never even dreamed of, you could—"

"I never _dreamed_ about those. I never thought about what it'd be like after everything was over."

"That doesn't mean you should waste your chance."

Deliberately, Keith leans down. Through the dim and the dust, his gaze gutters like kindling, a new flame crackling alive. "Is that what I'm doing?"

 _After._ He says _the war_ , and Keith says _everything_. Towards the end, he'd hear them batting endings back and forth in the common room: _a year from now, I'm gonna be in the middle of an eight-hour surf, and after that I'm shotgunning, like, six slushies in a row. Man, do any of you guys even remember slushies?_ Or: _after this is done, perhaps we can think about expanding the castle's library._ Only Keith had talked about fighting like it was the only life left.

There's a hand clasping his shoulder, thumb against his hollow pulse. Salt on his lip, the taste of skin. His thoughts are blanking. "What?" 

"Right now," Keith says, lower. "Am I wasting my time?"

Shiro stares. There's only one answer that he knows down to his bones and nerves, an answer that lights his tendons and fuse-thread veins; it snaps on his tongue like a spark. He swallows—and if memory's betrayed him, desire's worse with its easy constant, a magnet that draws his palm up along the slant of a newly familiar throat. "Keith," he says, and means a thousand things— _you don't know what you're asking; you don't know what you'll lose; it's never going to be that simple_ —but Keith's already leaned down to meet him, to kiss him like a lifeline flung from days long lost.  


# *

  
They climb out in the end, wincing and weaving up the ice-numbed road back to the capital. In the days after, Keith leaves their suite only once to buy a toolkit from one of Xindi's floating markets; he lets Shiro take the steel arm's check-up and repairs himself, bringing water and tweaking wires only where he's asked. Salves filter into the rooms on floating crystal platters, one after another; a note in the priest's typelettered hand clings to the first glass bell: _my pretty backwater fools. I told you not to try playing tourists without a reliable guide._

Plausible deniability, Shiro guesses—though the practical note doesn't stop Keith from chuting the note and tumbling Shiro back into the sheets.

Five days after, the last invitation comes: _Choice. Rites begin three strokes after the dawn. Be earlier than the sun_.

Together, they find their way back to the original temple district, riding the hyperloop through a converted artificial canal. The Theatre of Choice's least holy, least detailed in the records, and it looks no better than its foreshadowing whispers: a neon sprawl over a rust-eaten door at the end of an alleyway, half its letters burned out. Its hinges creak, and the steps trail down, down, deep into the earth to a low, open space like a tomb's annex, languishing and electric, all bleak torchlights and a stage wreathed in smoke. Half the city must have poured down the steps for the final rite; supplicants clatter around five altars in fishnets and robes, in the skinsuits which seem to have come into fashion for the cold season, in creamy overcoats with their cuffs all polished fur. Priests move through the throng like old sheepdogs, rounding and herding with the weary disinterest of long practice.

The oracle stands alone on the white dais, unmistakable. Even in shadow, she burns like a missile launch, billowing ivory through the grime and fraying gowns. No faithful's bold enough to tread into her space; but they crowd around the circle, hungry-eyed, stretching out their drowning hands—gangling figures in students' robes, leashed with flowering garlands; stocky children blinking through the distended eyepieces of professional jewelers. The air's still but for murmurs and shuffling steps, though cries spark and thrill through the crowd where the oracle deigns to clasp an outstretched hand, where she lends an ear and murmurs her blessings. 

Paklar isn't on the floor at all. It's Shiro who spots her on one of the few swooping balconies which lean over the floor. She spares them a white, meaningless glance as they step through the curtains before her head swings back to trail the oracle like a lost moon.

"She's weakened," she says in her usual fanged, stark way. She settles against her skeletal chair, cocks a wrist against its glistening arm. Her robes flare over the bones of it, silky and white as a winter day scraped bare; she kicks a morose black boot against the alcove bars. "This is the final rite. Only two hundred years ago, the theatre would have been crammed to standing room; all of these children would have breathed and ached with bliss at the oracle's whim, reaching into the depths of the city's networks to rechannel oxygen and saturate the air with tranquilisers. Now she can barely make promises fit for keeping." 

Her fist bristles in the air, shining.

Keith slouches over the railing, measuring the room in a sweep. "Is the crowd going to do anything?"

"They'll worship. They'll beg. They'll stop just short of blaspheming with prayer." She sneers. "Fate save them, they've never known better."

"I _mean_ if they're going to get in the way when we go after her, we need to know that now." His voice's leaden with watching. "This is the last rite. That means it's our last chance to find the mandate."

Catlike, her mood turns, transformed; the priest cocks her head, snaps her constant pipe from a fluttering sleeve and jabs it to her lip. "She'll go back to it," she drawls. "There's no worry about that. You'll have a gap where the ceremony ends. No one will be in a position to bear witness; even weakened as she is, she can offer that. Follow her, and take it."

Keith only looks at her: sheathed in mourning silk and rigid as a sentinel. "Make sure someone sees you up here," he says at last. Her white eyes flash over his.

They wait. The feasts settle; the rite begins. Somewhere, Shiro knows, is the dividing line; but its color, its exact moment, never quite comes clear. Through the tumult, the oracle sinks from her dais. At once the crowd parts for her step, seas awash in terror and need. Her plump hands ghost and pearl through the sunken lights, all reach and promise, and her supplicants move with her. Body after body spins out like a dance in the throng, drifting before her and away again, figures carrying away with them her ringing whispers: futures, secrets, a promise for every supplicant. 

The priest's blind gaze holds fast as knives through bone.

A distant drumbeat pours in. Time stretches under the hazy wash of the hanging lamps, contradictions and tautologies beating in tandem. The oracle leaves some stranded in the crowd, shrinking and swaying; she finds and whispers a lifelong stream of forgiveness to each parishioner. But the dance winds down; the oracle curves her way back to the stage. On the dais she stops again, rooted beneath the pooling spotlights with her hands knotted before her. 

She talks.

In a voice clear as tapping glass, the oracle tells them stories: how, eight thousand years ago, Rhoen had seen the fallacies of the outside world and locked its gates against them. How Xindi grew in peace as flowers would in a biosphere. _Fear,_ she says, _steeps its roots in those shadows where we do not know ourselves._ And how they've learned their own kind! Rhoen's numbers dwindled in accordance with fate, but they lack for nothing, here in this part of space where its central radiating star's been tamed and its continents sculpted to suit the needs of the living. The altars hold their hopes; the priests teach forgiveness; but Rhoen is the beating heart of them, the source of all faith and all fate; its actions unfold only as its citizens deserve. If they are to be great together, they must trust in that. 

A million souls twining towards a single end.

" _Xindi_ ," their oracle says, and her voice rises to a throb. "Each of you has been touched by my voice; I've bound myself to you. Will you take my vow again for the new century?"

The crowd roars, thunder rattling every lamp—and beneath the shattering tide of faith, something swells through her shadow, images doubling and jarring colors: a carapace, a continent, chains pulsing like vines where they've roped and sewn into her back.

Salt and ash, a warmth fit to cut through any shadow. Keith's leaning over him; his voice breaks the noise, electric at his ear. "We have to go, Shiro, _now_."

He turns, conscious of the priest's unfaltering, mirror-eyed stare. "I think we've got a line on her exit," Shiro says, nodding down to the stage, the little door sighing open in the corner, nearly obscured. "All we have to do is get there."

The crowd's still swaying, blessings and supplications teeming into elated chaos as the oracle turns from her congregation. Keith swings a measuring glance over the landing, hops the railing without a beat missed; Shiro stares ceilingward but follows after. He lands on his feet, a rattling thud, and surges up. A few heads whip towards them, startled, lips shaping the start of some half-question—but Keith's already moving. He seizes Shiro's shirtcollar, hauls him down into a kiss, all bite and need and bruising fit to drown.

If there's a question to it, this answer takes no thought at all: a palm settles along his nape, bracketing the tilt of his head; a thumb sweeps his prickling downy hair with the slight, muted tenderness that always gets Keith's mouth to part. 

By the time they come up for air, the last of the would-be starers have shied away.

"Guess that worked," Shiro says, ragged, a little bewildered. At the back of his head, there gleams a dim sort of horror: Rhoen's first contact with an alien species after eight thousand years, and their legacy is of a bipedal sex-crazed species, branded by exhibitionism and blasphemy, capable of a mob's worth of murder.

No. He'll think of it later.

They reach the corner just in time, seizing the door before it sighs shut. One after another, they ease through it. 

The passage's inlaid with the same heavy gilding as the wider chamber, just wide enough to take two bodies side by side, hurrying. Not one door breaks its sleek walls. They follow its winding down, into a spiraling passage where the gilt begins to flake and the stony floor wanes to ice. What had looked like a cheap divebar must have built on roots older than they could've guessed. Down, down, the shadows run, leaving them to trail after: out of stone and into widening hollows where the walls run veined with black and silver, centuries-darkened ice. "Are you—" Shiro starts, but Keith palms his elbow in warning, presses a finger against his mouth. 

A gate bars the end of the little hall; through its iron teeth spills a wintry light, spills the black wood's low, electric hum.

A white chamber, bare. A woman alone.

Not one lash flutters as the gate's fangs gnash and scrape the floor. She's sunken on a dais at the far end of the room, her body moulding against the curve of a vast black stone—the same sleek obsidian as the landing that they'd reached outside the city. It pulses like faraway thunder, and through her silks and her papery skin, the oracle's veins blacken with each beat, thick enough to see it across the white floor: two lives wired into the same heart. 

With every breath, the air's blurring, shivering. Pressure clenches his skull like a fist. Shiro grinds his jaw; his arms flex, and a spark roils through his metal fingers, then stills. His head jerks, and he wrenches hard—but his right hand spills slack at his side, though every chip and sinew in it's crackling and purring alive, something wired to answer the stone's voiceless call.

"Keith," he says, and at once Keith's stiff against him. Body braces body, lashing out for any kind of anchor as some unseen weight goes hurtling into the air, dizzy as a storm. "That's—"

 _The mandate._ It has to be. 

"Do we need to get out of here?"

 _Here_. The theatre, the rite. Paklar waiting above, at the tail-end of a century burned away in hope. "No," Shiro says, hoarse—but they can't steal the mandate, either, not if this is its answer to intruders. Thought races thought, pounding through every limb. "We need to talk to her. Get her away from that stone. It feels like—they're _connected_ somehow."

"Connected," Keith echoes, and the horror of it rings through the dripping air—though it's hard to string tone and thought together, piece that hollow sound into something that'll bear up his staggering head in this skeletal room. "They weren't supposed to be—"

Another pulse.

A cry cracks his teeth—in an instant, they're staggering together, sinking to their knees beneath the white pressure of the stone's open heart. Sound knifes through them both, scouring bright; electricity churns down his nerves, and he _remembers_ this, an agony like fusing metal to flesh all over again, prying and stitching circuits into tendons, flipping dials until every sensor came alive—

" _Shiro!_ "

The world spins black.

Light shocks through his eyelids, livid and stuttering. The air grinds his cheek like ice—Keith's fallen, he realises. They both have. His hand falters, boneless, weak as thread where it scratches along the floor. "Keith," he says, " _Keith_." It tears out of his lungs, a litany, a plea in pieces, blind shrapnel on his tongue as his voice rises over a body shuddering to breathe. A red sword gleams inches from his outstretched shaking fingers.

With one hand, he wrenches himself up. The metal arm sways at his side like a doll's, throb limping after throb, lightless and useless. Overhead, the oracle hasn't risen, hasn't moved. Light's scraped the black out of her hard-veined limbs; on the mandate's platform, she radiates like a star.

He doesn't need force to know what to do.

Shiro bows his head. "I guess we don't have time to talk," he says. He reaches out; his grip locks tight. Alone, he rises.

One step splits the silence. Another. His boot strikes the platform and a belling note tolls the air. The oracle's eyes flick open. Her inkblot pupils fix and pool in a stunned loop; her mouth parts in a mist-pale sigh—but after all the sermons and blessings, the sound's burned out of her. Only her fingers stir, tapping out the stone's sonorous beat.

He steps forward. In his human hand, the red bayard curves like an ax. "I'm sorry," Shiro tells her, and means it. "I had a feeling it was going to come down to this. And between the two of us," hushed through the wintry quiet, "he's had enough blood on his hands."

 _Eighty percent of sentient species with circulatory systems—_ and the point sinks gleaming to her throat.

" _Don't!_ "

The gate trembles and clangs, thundering. It shatters.

Through the splinters come the priest's crackling stride. Her hand's still outflung; her robes whip behind her like banners. The stone's last pulse buzzes and sputters, hangs in the quavering air like a condemned thing; the room strains against its hum as her fists wrench and twist. "I forbid you—fate take you, by heaven and by everlasting war, if you touch her, I'll _gut_ you with curses myself—"

The blade's rattling. His grip tightens. "You wanted this," Shiro says, incredulous and raw. Keith might not have guessed, but it's impossible to think that Paklar hadn't. "What did she _do_ to him—"

"What does he _matter?_ I didn't ask for this, never _this_ —" Already, Paklar's snarled across the white floor in strides. A tendril snaps the blade away, and in a single heartbeat she's on her knees, her hands fanning silver across the oracle's snow-charred skin.

Movement stirs: at the corner of his eye, Keith's hefting himself up from the floor. Air cracks in his teeth; the world cuts into sharp relief. "Keith," Shiro says, and goes to him.

On the steps, the priest's still clinging, panting and hauling up the target that she'd called them to dethrone. The oracle shivers; her eyes flicker, beat after beat. "Oh," she sighs on a tarnishing breath. "You. Of course it was you. Who else would know—who else would be so desperate—"

Keith's still turned against him, fingers jutting hot against his bicep, bodies steeling one another and their eyes clinging stark through all the ice. From a distance, memory boils into memory: the acolytes' hands flashing and flocking around Paklar's shoulders on the ministry's steps, never breaching the gap; the oracle's foot on the stair; her fingers stretched in an open bridge to Paklar on the day that they'd come to the city gates. _We touch things to define or unmake them. There are no alternatives._

But there is, it seems, one more.

"If you intend to blame me for saving you," the priest says, "I'll take the curse for that."

" _Saving me_." The oracle shuts her marbled eyes; her frost drips contempt. "Let's not put a pretty name on your need to wreck a planet in an effort to see a handful of stars."

"Spoken like an old crone who's sunk into her crystal stasis already. Are we so free between our altars and shields?"

"Not anymore, I suppose," the oracle says. Her gaze wafts across the floor: from the two paladins collapsed amid the shrapnel to the black stone dreaming behind her. "I see," she says, in tones dim as powder. "You gave our guests your priest's blessing and let them wander. The altars are registration devices as much as they are our primary diagnostic method. They knew how to incorporate and anticipate the hopes of our citizens into a calculation to maximize prosperity—but you gave your place away to aliens. A strange new form, carrying an old, old blessing. No wonder the ministry's recent confidence margins have been so unreliable for fatereadings. The old systems were never equipped to account for outside factors. I wonder," she adds, dripping honey, "how many took your false fortunes with them and fell to wounds, to misrule and loss."

The priest only looks at her, venom sapped dry. "It is the way of the wider world: Always something you can't anticipate." 

"Was the whole future worth it? To toy with lives. To leech at my strength until a mistargeted ritual could bring me down. So much force and care, all to see me humbled, kneeling, destroyed before you."

"I didn't do this," Paklar whispers, every syllable lashing silver, furious, "to _destroy you_."

"The power of the oracles comes from the stability of a closed system. In a world whose every element is known to us, whose allegiances and interactions have been mapped a thousand-thousand times over, how could we have any misery left? No war, no one hungry. Destroy that," the oracle says, "and what would be left of me?"

The priest laughs, a lurid metal shriek. "As children," she says. "You were so curious, more than I was ever wired to be—always craving to see the jungles, the deep ravines, the edge of the world where the seas fall away from the continents shored up high. There's more to this universe than all of Rhoen could promise us. Isn't it time we unbound ourselves from a bargain we can't afford?"

"We," says the oracle of Xindi.

"I, then," the priest says, gaunt with exhaust. "I'm selfish. I'm tired. Unwire me if you must, and cinder my remains. I give myself to your hands. Only spare those who followed me out of ignorance."

The oracle lifts her head. Whatever strength the mandate had pried out of her isn't tiding back: her pale hair's drained to glass, her once-polished skin withered to the color of old bone; even her nails have bleached from their sheer flush into ivory. Against the priest's silvery temper, she's transparent and ashen, a curving ghost—and still there's her voice, note after note of steady, plangent longing. "A hundred years I looked away from you," she whispers. "Fate allows no loose ends. You should have been uprooted, in name and image, for blasphemy. I gave so much to see you safe, I— _prayed_ —" 

Their hands are still tangled; the static between them roils like thunder, heavier than the mandate's pulse quavering overhead.

Into the hush, the oracle says, "What will they do?"

 _They_. Two paladins still slumped along the floor. A hilt bright as flame bent to his grip.

"Nothing," Paklar says, blank-eyed. One wrist flickers, an empty dazzle. "After all that scheming—nothing. Freedom can't be trained into you. You understand it or you don't."

"You're giving up," the oracle says, "very easily."

"Aren't our best lies the ones we keep for ourselves? I told myself that I wanted to free my people. I wanted to bring my sect back to take the Ministry of Necessity again; I would have seeded every breeding pod in Ferengi from my faithfuls—oh, I had such grand, great plans. But," she laughs, metallic, "you _prayed_ for me. Even if you executed me today, you'll never destroy that."

 _What happens in deathless Xindi is as fate proscribes._ For eight thousand years, the planet Rhoen had spun in lightless solitude, taken no help, stripped out every graceless futile hope as each took root, lived on history and calculation and the certainty of its oracles. Trailing a merciless fate and backed by the sky, the great city of Xindi had needed no prayers; _courage_ , in a Rhoenese life, was only the capacity to accept the inevitable.

Through the stillness, Paklar and Xindi look at each other like strangers.

"I'm afraid your execution must be postponed," the oracle says, husky and intent. "It will take the aid of every skilled priest to bring the capital under control, once the mandate disappears."

Her fingertips skim Paklar's knuckles, a touch as frail as opal. Their hands lace; the priest pulls her to her feet. Together, they turn to the quieting stone.  


# *

  
"Think we did the right thing?"

From the ice-mottled bluff, Shiro turns. A gauzy dawn's already found Xindi transformed: its watchtowers darkened, its black gates agape and swaying to every flirting breeze. Smoke drawls up from corners and sidestreets, all the muted cracks where the theatres and altars once glowered like eyes. All through the early hours, citizens have trickled forth and back from its unguarded doors, in black livery and silver-green. No voices shouting for celebrations, not yet—but progress is a slow burn.

"She went to Voltron for help. We gave it to them. Xindi gets to make their own decisions from now on. I think it's fair," Shiro says to Keith's folded arms, his drawn mouth. He props a hand on his hip. "No one owes their whole lives to protect the world from everything that could hurt them."

Their eyes catch in an unspeakable heartbeat.

Shiro turns away first. The Black Lion rumbles as he heads over; with her comes the slim metallic buzz of a second mind crowding into his skull. He listens for a while—to its lingering proof, another relic of a war long gone—before he presses it aside.

"You're heading out, huh."

By the glinting black muzzle, Shiro stops. "I was supposed to fly a circuit in the Deciuenn system before the traders out here flagged me. The Galra hit that entire quadrant pretty hard the first time they invaded; they don't remember anything before the subjugation. Their neighbors say they're nervous about getting conquered in the name of a Galra knockoff. I thought I'd take a look at the situation."

"And what about after that?"

Silence unwinds, grey through the dust.

"Fine," Keith says. "At least I've got a system to start looking this time."

The armor's gleaming on his shoulders again, white as new steel. He could be mapping new expeditions in a battered Garrison office, sifting old secrets from a desert cabin; he could strip away his gloves and shoulderpieces and helmet, part by caging part, walk into the empty sun and vanish. He could be tracing some footpath worn pale on Earth, and instead he's here, digging his claws into a ghost. 

"Keith," Shiro says, and crushes down the impulse that glints and swells in his gorge. _Sorry_ 'd be a kindness to no one but himself. "I can't give you the answer you're looking for."

They do nothing good for each other, and they won't talk about _worse_ —the forest's dark heartbeat still suspended between them, the moment that could've been murder in a lost white chamber beneath the theatre. Still Keith pushes closer, step by step. "You can do anything you want," he says, dark-eyed, intent. "You've always been the best person I've known. If you don't want to come back, fine. But don't tell me it's because you don't have a choice."

 _Choices._ Human habit curdles the words on his tongue; it is, after all, the human answer. The war's settled, he knows; across galaxies, teachers and historians are already at work, flattening rubble into pages, bandaging wounds with prose. But he still wakes with his fingers raking talons through the sheets, with the salt-sting of blood drying the back of his throat—wakes mid-stride from a crowded enclosure with a gold-glaring shadow prowling through the cages of his every hollow thought. Takashi Shirogane'd been a man born for stars and dizzying flights, maybe; but that name was driven to an end, shattered and remade. This is all they left of him: nerve and fury and killing instinct scraped raw, a weapon first and always.

He's better now, different—but he'll never be anything else.

He means to go. He should. It'd be the kinder thing to do: a clean break. He doesn't owe Keith that—whatever else, Keith's never been the kind of boy who numbers his debts. But he wants to. He wants to take the flyboy-turned-soldier, who'd always understood kindness as a miracle, and press that into his palms, leave him with a last kiss and a new page. 

_Want_. It's no better than a prayer in his teeth.

"Back in the arena," Shiro says, like nonsense. " I tried to stop fighting, once, after the first few matches. They sent guards to beat the cage bars. Not all the time. Just every couple hours. I remember one—he was pretty short, for a Galra. Short beard, short nails, short—everything. He liked to come down even when he wasn't on duty—tell us that he'd been where we were. He got out in the end because he learned how to be loyal to the Empire. He was the one they'd assign to bring food. They'd pour it out for some of the prisoners from the block across, when we were awake. So that we could see them. Tell the others that they'd get food when our cell block won another match. Sometimes they'd take people from the block—we never knew why, or where they went. Whenever we asked—" His mouth twists, quoting; even after all this time, he can't reframe it with his own voice. " _The release of prisoners is considered a surrender of Galra property, beyond the discretion of empire officials without direct orders from the emperor. The disposal of property is not._ "

"Eventually, I stopped doing much of anything. I fought when they took us out to the tunnels, and they started letting us sleep again, bringing us troughs. Bowls, sometimes, if the match was good. I kept fighting, and eventually they called me _the champion_. That made it easier." Takashi Shirogane was a name—Shiro's name. Shiro was elsewhere, draped in the Garrison's cheap regulation cotton while a prisoner's nails crusted and tore and ground smooth again. Someday, Shiro might stand in marvel at the linguistics of inhuman slang and gossip; he'd slouch and wait with pilots gathered from light-years around while scientists and diplomats picked their delicate way through humanity's first alien contact. He'd chat a little, maybe. Introduce their rides. Learn the phonetics of a strange new _hello_ before he learned _fuck off_ and _don't touch her_.

 _Fear steeps its roots where we do not know ourselves,_ the oracle had said; but there's more than one kind of terror. In the arena's prisons, absurdly, he'd feared the reek most of all: acid and sulfur and sweat, the pungency of prisoners crowding, thick with coercive, ugly speculation and bargains. On some night, he'd woken to some green-furred alien's fouling splattered along the floor, stinking of scorch and fear, _why do they have to keep us civilised folk in this place with a killer, a monster?_ That had been the end of it. He'd picked a fight in the cell: seized a fistful of the biggest alien's eyestalks and swung him up against the wall just to make a good show. It'd taken two armed guards to haul him out.

They kept him in solitude for some time. When they slung him back into the block, the other prisoners had been fed, some treated. 

Even the Galra knew: disposal was an alternative, not a goal. It was the show they wanted, audiences and guards alike: the rise and fall of all their bets and fortunes, the lodestar disaster, a monster worse than any beast they could send. The longer that the prisoner could keep them entertained, the more they'd shunt the other prisoners back into the cages, bury them in the dark, keep them safe. Together, guards and prisoners had built a sympathetic mass conspiracy to lock him in. With thought or in nerve, everyone had understood: no one wanted to play _hero_.

No one in the cells had.

"It doesn't matter now. When I woke up," Shiro says. "In the cabin, all those years ago. All I had to do was look at you, and I knew. It could've been worse."

"I could've fought," Keith says, fists tight, knife-bright. "I _would_ have."

"I know."

He would have fought, longer than Shiro had—would have rended himself until there was nothing left. It's what they do to each other, heartsore and headlong. What they'll always do.

"You're right," Shiro says, slow enough to etch every word. His throat aches with the weight. "I do have a choice now. We both do. But keeping you from a normal life—that's not a choice, Keith. If I didn't know you were out there—" He stops. "I'm not saying that it's fair. You sound like you're doing good work with Allura and the rest of the paladins. But I don't want to be the thing that holds you back when you start missing home."

"Home," Keith echoes. His gaze snaps down; his arms sway at his sides. For a heartbeat, he could be the Garrison flyboy all over again, a cadet on the launchpad with his head bent to fate. "You don't get it. I've been telling you all along. Back when I was a kid—maybe I'd have done anything to find a place. Maybe I'll miss Earth someday—but not right now. There's nothing back there for me anymore. In a hundred years, the Garrison couldn't take me as far as Red could in one hour. My dad's gone. Even the cabin wasn't really _mine_. No one's waiting for me back there, and it wouldn't make a difference if they did. If I had to look for _home_ anywhere, with anyone, it'd be—"

" _Keith_ ," Shiro says, harsh as salt. He can't hear this—can't take this conviction with him out of orbit, carry it across systems and galaxies and pretend that he won't dream his way back. 

When had it started? In the dark, between stars, he'd looked away and a secret had come to roost beneath his caging ribs. 

"There's so much that you don't know," he says, "that you deserve to see before you make a decision. The things I've done. What I am now. Even _I_ don't know—I'm not sure I could tell you if I tried."

"I'm not asking you to know," Keith says. He steps forward, once and again, like he doesn't know any better. All that scarring and armor and he's still the same, heedless and headstrong. "I'm not following you because of Voltron, or something you said to me at the Garrison. You don't have to try to be something for me, Shiro. You already _are_ —"

The last word shorts out.

He remembers that look: from the launchpad, in dark cells, dreamt a thousand times over, Keith with his lips parted and his body bowed into longing. It's smudged grumblings and confessions alike into his shoulder, warmed his pillow when he'd stumbled into Shiro's room after hours. It's shouted his name across battlefields, cries fit to boil the stars from the sky. It's knelt for him, whispered and promised, _Shiro, you know me_ , a fractured prayer for a life long charred dry. Memory overlaps memory in a flashover: Paklar cradling the oracle in her silvery arms, the promise of galaxies caught in her pounding voice. Centuries she'd plotted in wait, her lungs stitched with hope and her eyes crowded with dead constellations, a history left burning too long to be extinguished. 

"One more mission," Keith says.

_I give myself to your hands._

He doesn't deserve this. But it isn't about deserving. Given a hundred years, a thousand, he too might come back to this: to be unmade and remade by the hands that know him best.

"All right," Shiro says, too soft. "Just one more." Across a year's brimming distance, he reaches out, traces steel along throat and jaw. Keith leans in, chasing his exhale.

Above their heads, the morning breaks to light.  


  


# * 

  


  



End file.
